Rules of Baccarat

Baccarat is one of those casino games that you may have heard of or thought that it looked easy in passing but don’t really know that much about it. It’s a card game unlike any other that originated in France and can bring in high stakes.

Baccarat has a simple goal: get a total value of 9, or as close to it as possible. You get dealt up to three cards to do this. Cards 2 through 9 are face value. Aces are worth 1, and 10’s and face cards are worth 0. It’s a game of addition and subtraction. If the value of your hand exceeds 9, 10 is subtracted. Let’s say you get dealt a 3 and a 9. That has a value of 2 because 12-10=2. It’s best not to go over 9.

You stop at three cards in baccarat. If your first two cards have a combined value of 6 or higher, you can’t take a third card. A two-card hand with a value of 8 or 9 is called a natural hand. In this scenario, a player can’t draw a third card.

Up to 14 players can play a baccarat game. The dealer shuffles and puts the card in a shoe for players to take turns dealing from. A table may have up to three dealers. The middle one is the caller, announcing totals and determining who gets a third card. The two dealers on the ends of the table oversee wins and losses and how much the banker gets on losses.

The tricky part is that you have three options for betting. You can bet that your hand will win, that the banker’s hand will win, or that the hands will tie. There are rows for each bet on the table. Baccarat has a great house edge for players at only 1.4%.