Baccarat (Punto Banco)
Pick a side and the tableau plays itself. The three bets are priced exactly from the live shoe — every possible deal enumerated — including the famous non-secret that counting barely moves them.
Punto, banco or tie
- 3bets
- exactfrom the live shoe
- 1.06%best edge
Manual
- Three bets.
- Punto pays 1:1, banco 1:1 less a 5% commission on the win, the tie 8:1. A tie pushes the flat bets — stakes on punto and banco come back.
- Card values.
- The ace counts one, twos through nines their pips, tens and faces zero. A hand’s total is the last digit of the sum.
- Naturals.
- An 8 or 9 on the first two cards freezes both hands where they stand.
- The tableau.
- Punto draws on 0–5 and stands on 6–7. Banco follows a fixed table read against punto’s third card. Nobody chooses anything.
- The shoe.
- Eight decks, dealt on from hand to hand until fewer than 52 cards remain, then reshuffled. The ledger prices whatever is actually left.
The game
Two hands are dealt face up — punto (the player’s side) and banco (the bank’s) — and you bet on which will finish nearer nine, or on the tie. That bet is the whole of your part: once it is down, the tableau plays both hands out by rule.
The ace counts one, twos through nines count their pips, tens and faces count zero, and a hand’s total is the last digit of the sum — a 7 and an 8 make 5. An 8 or 9 on the first two cards is a natural and freezes both hands where they stand.
When neither side holds a natural, the tableau takes over:
| Punto, total 0–5 | draws a third card |
| Punto, total 6–7 | stands |
| Banco 0–2 | always draws |
| Banco 3 | draws unless punto’s third card was an 8 |
| Banco 4 | draws against punto’s third card 2–7 |
| Banco 5 | draws against 4–7 |
| Banco 6 | draws against 6–7 |
| Banco 7 | stands |
The numbers
Exact on a fresh eight-deck shoe — every possible deal enumerated:
| Banco wins | 45.86% |
| Punto wins | 44.62% |
| Tie | 9.52% |
| Banco edge · after the 5% commission | 1.06% |
| Punto edge | 1.24% |
| Tie edge · at 8:1 | 14.36% |
| Tie edge · even at 9:1 | ~4.8% |
Why banco wins more
Banco acts second, and its half of the tableau is written in terms of punto’s third card — it draws bravely against a weak card and sits tight against a strong one. That is drawing with information, and it is why banco finishes ahead more often than it finishes behind.
The tableau is not a constraint on strategy; it IS the strategy, fossilised. Centuries of play reduced every drawing decision to its best line and then fixed the result in the rules — which is why there is nothing left for you to decide once the bet is down.
Counting
Blackjack falls to counting because the player still has decisions to make when the shoe goes rich. Baccarat does not: the demonstration is to strip all thirty-two nines from the shoe — a count beyond any human — and watch the banco edge move by under half a point while staying negative. No realistic depletion ever prices any of the three bets into profit.
The cards-gone cheat in Training lets you run that experiment yourself: pull any value from the live shoe and the ledger reprices the exact odds on every tap. That is the lesson of the game — the numbers move, and they never move enough.