Baccarat has been around for centuries, but the game has never gained as much popularity as it has in the past few decades. Tracing its roots to the gambling salons of Italy and France, Baccarat now draws in high rollers from all over the world. It’s a favorite at online casinos, too.
The game’s rules are relatively simple: Two hands, the Player hand and the Banker hand are dealt cards, face up. The one whose total is closest to 9 wins. All other cards are worth their face value except tens, which have the value of zero. The game also has a unique scoring system where all numbers over 10 have ten subtracted from the total. This makes baccarat different from blackjack, where the highest number is counted.
Players wager on either the player or the banker hand, or on a tie. Winning player and banker bets have a low house advantage, but a winning tie bet pays eight to one and has a much higher house edge than the other bets. For this reason, most serious players stick to player or banker bets.
Traditionally, players play baccarat on large tables with tuxedo-clad dealers. While this can still be found in some land-based casinos, many have moved to smaller tables and more streamlined rules. Table minimums have gotten a lot lower, too. Baccarat has been making a big comeback on the casino floor, especially among Asian gamblers. Bill Zender, a former Nevada Gaming Control agent and casino dealer who literally wrote the book on managing casino games, says that baccarat has become the game of choice for high-rollers from Asia because it fits their cultural preferences better than other card games do.
The craze for the game has generated several variants and additional ways to bet and play, including Mini Baccarat and side bets. It has also led to increased attention on the part of casino management and the media, with more research on the game’s mathematical foundations. While some critics believe that the game’s rules are unfair, most players do not find any problems with its basic structure.
While the exact origin of baccarat is unknown, it has been played for centuries in places as diverse as sticky-floor California card rooms and the tuxedo-laden casinos of Monaco. It was popular in China before the Qing dynasty, and is now one of the most popular card games in the world.
The game’s enduring popularity has made it a major source of income for casinos in Macau, where it has dethroned slot machines as the top moneymaker, and in Singapore. While it is less popular in Las Vegas, baccarat still makes up about 18 percent of the total win for Strip casinos. It’s even more popular in the rest of the world, with Asian gamblers accounting for most of that growth. Baccarat has become so huge that it’s even spawned an entire industry of books on strategy and a variety of other betting systems.