Baccarat

Baccarat is a card game of comparison: two hands are dealt — the Player and the Banker — and you bet on which one will come closer to nine. There are no decisions after the bet is placed. The dealer follows a fixed set of drawing rules, the cards are turned, and the hand closer to nine wins. The beauty of baccarat is that it is a game you watch rather than play — you place your bet, and the cards do the rest.

The name almost certainly comes from the Italian word baccara, meaning zero — the value of the tens and face cards that make up the bulk of the deck. The game originated in Italy in the 1400s, possibly adapted from an old Etruscan ritual in which a virgin threw a nine-sided die to determine her fate: eight or nine and she became a priestess, six or seven and she kept her vows, and anything less and she walked into the sea. The game that emerged from this myth was called baccara, and it traveled north through the Italian and French nobility.

Two main variants took root in France. Baccarat chemin de fer — the railway version, so called because the shoe moves from player to player like a train — became the favorite of the French aristocracy in the 19th century. Baccarat banque, with a permanent banker, was the high-stakes version played in the grand houses of the Riviera. Both versions were games of skill in the sense that the player with the bank could decide whether to draw a third card — a decision that gave the game its strategic tension.

The modern game, known as punto banco, was developed in Havana in the 1940s and exported to Las Vegas and Macau. In punto banco, the drawing decisions were removed from the player entirely — the casino dealer follows a fixed set of rules, and the game became pure betting. This is the version that took over the world. Punto banco is the game played in every casino from Macau to Monte Carlo, and it is the game that accounts for the overwhelming majority of casino revenue in the Asian markets.

The mathematics of baccarat are what make it the most attractive game in the casino for a serious bettor. The house edge on the Banker bet — after the 5 percent commission — is 1.06 percent. The house edge on the Player bet is 1.24 percent. These are the thinnest margins in the casino: blackjack, played perfectly, has a house edge of about 0.5 percent, but blackjack requires perfect play and card counting to achieve that edge. Baccarat requires nothing but the right bet. The Tie bet, at over 14 percent house edge, is a sucker bet — and the only thing the serious player needs to know to avoid.

The culture of baccarat is unlike any other game in the casino. In Macau, the VIP baccarat rooms are the engine of the global casino industry — private salons where millions change hands in a single shoe, dealt from a shoe of eight decks, with minimum bets that start in the thousands. In Las Vegas, baccarat is the game of the high-limit rooms, where the tuxedoed dealers and the formal rituals of the squeeze — the slow reveal of the card — are preserved as theater. The game has always carried an air of exclusivity that belies its simplicity: it is the easiest game in the casino to play, and the hardest to afford.

For the empty nester, baccarat is a game of patience and bankroll management. The serious player does not try to predict the cards — the cards are random, and the shoe has no memory. The serious player manages the bet: flat-betting the Banker, riding the streaks that come and go, and never touching the Tie bet. The first day is learning the rules — which take five minutes. The hundredth day is knowing when to walk away — which takes a lifetime.