For a stylish game of chance with a low casino edge and high chances of winning, baccarat is what you're looking for.

Basic baccarat strategy

How to win baccarat? There are many basic baccarat strategy moves one can play to make the chances of winning higher. Also, there are misleading strategies best to avoid.

Among gamblers, a good baccarat strategy is usually considered a legend. The reason for this is that any strategy that promotes itself as a system is most likely full of false, deceptive, and useless information.

How to avoid useless strategies and casino traps

The scorecard

A major aspect of the baccarat games played at the local casino is the scorecard. It looks like everyone at the table is keeping track of the outcome on each hand, and that's exactly what they're doing. These players are trying to find patterns and then change their own betting patterns in order to take advantage of a streak. Since the casinos know it has no bearing on the outcome of the game they encourage this behavior. Chasing patterns in baccarat is as pointless as it is in roulette. Each hand is completely different from the next, and is never influenced by the preceding hands. This is a simple trap that gamblers all around the world fall into at one time or another. If you were betting on the flip of a coin, and it landed heads up 9 times in a row, part of your brain will without doubt yell out to you that it's likely that the 10th flip will land tails up. This reasoning is spurious; the chance of the coin landing tails up on the 10th flip is still exactly 50%, just as it was the first nine times. Any baccarat strategy that makes you change your bets based on previous hands is useless and should be completely ignored.

So, although you will see almost everyone around you at the baccarat table marking down numbers on casino provided cards, you should look at it only as personal entertainment. Don't be fooled into participating, its just another way for the casino to take your mind off the important parts of the game. Think about it, would Las Vegas casinos offer baccarat players a pencil and a chart if these could really help them win?

Card counting

The card counting is another false alley in published baccarat strategy. Card counting is usually associated with the game of blackjack, as it can be quite an effective strategy when utilized properly in the right casino. It would also appear at first, to be an authentically good strategy in baccarat, as it works off of a similar shoe. In baccarat specifically the problems with card counting derive from some basic differences in the game. Unlike blackjack baccarat does not offer opportunities to adjust your bet in mid-hand play. Blackjack offers this ability in a number of specific situations, and so you can increase your bet if your count changes during the session. The problem is of course the issue of used cards being fed back into the shoe before very many have been removed (thus making useless any count you had made to that point). Using card counting in baccarat offers hardly any situations with an advantage against the house and so the efforts become worthless.

The martingale system

Baccarat can be looked upon as a coin toss played with a lot of elegance and with quite an amount of pomposity. Many people let this oversimplified impression of the game tempt them towards using a martingale-based system.

These styles of systems have you double your bet each time you lose a hand, basing its logic on the fact that sooner or later your choice will win, and if you had doubled your bet each hand that win will regain all losses from preceding hands. This system is perfect and cannot be beaten in games like baccarat or roulette. But here comes the catch. Because this is true the casinos have issued new rules, which limit how much one can bet in one hand. Table maximums and minimums as they are referred to, put a complete end to the martingale system. For instance, you bet 5 dollars on banker and lost, next bet you put 10 bucks down on banker, next bet 20, and so on, and you keep loosing, it won't be very long before you double your bet right up to or over the table maximum. In this case of course you can't bet any higher, and your system has failed. If we only accomplish one thing with this web site, we hope it is convincing everyone that martingale systems have become absolutely horrific techniques designed to prey on the natural thought patterns of the human brain.

So if streak or pattern spotting, card counting, and systems are all ineffective strategies for baccarat, what's a good one? Looking at the numbers it becomes clear that the odds are always a little better when you bet on the banker. Does this mean you should always bet on banker? In a technical sense we suppose it does, but practically it would be the most boring use of your time ever if you just sat there betting on banker all night. However, there is the advanced baccarat strategy that can bring your odds up by far and help you win baccarat games.

Advanced Baccarat Strategy

Baccarat is a game of pure luck. The game is played using a fixed set of rules for the player and the dealer, and these rules represent the best odds of winning for both the player and for the house. Calculations have been made that show the odds of the player winning are 44.62%, losing 45.85%, and 9.53% to tie. Therefore it would seem to be to your advantage to bet on the house winning on every hand. To even out the odds the house charges a commission (usually 5%) on winning player bets placed on the house. How should this change the way you are going to bet?

Taking the commission into consideration it turns out that you are still a little better off by betting that the house will win. This theory is true when the commission is the usual 5%, however, if the commission changes then you have to change strategy. If the commission is less than 5% then it is always to your advantage to bet with the house, while if the commission is more than 5% it pays to bet on the player winning.

Removing the tie hands in the event there is no payoff, the probability of the player winning are 49.32% and for losing 50.68%. For various commissions we can calculate the following average payoffs then, assuming 100 wagers of $1 were made.