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%.

Rules of Let It Ride Poker

Let It Ride is like Pai Gow Poker in that it is a different and popular form of poker, but that’s about all the two have in common. You play the dealer in Let It Ride Poker and the betting is quite different than Five Card Draw Poker.

The Let It Ride Poker table is shaped like a blackjack table and the rules are simple. It’s the betting that is tricky. Five cards are dealt face down with two going to the dealer and three to the player. The goal of Let It Ride is still to form the best five-card poker hand. You just have more rounds of betting before you can see all five cards. That doesn’t mean that Let It Ride is an expensive game though, as the rounds of betting can be minimal. Each player has three spots labeled 1, 2 and $.

So, after looking at your three cards, you can take away bet 1 to fold or you can stay in the hand, hence letting it ride. The dealer then turns over their first card to be added as the fourth card in your hand. Then, you can remove bet 2 or let it ride again. Next, the dealer turns of the second and last card to complete your hand. Now, all players left in the hand must turn their cards over to determine a winner, which is based on standard poker hand rankings. Let It Ride Poker is sort of like a combination of blackjack and poker in that it is fast-paced and requires strategy in addition to luck.

Rules of Pai Gow Poker

Pai Gow Poker is pretty different than your standard Five Card Draw Poker. It’s quite a different take but it's a pretty popular casino game. It originated in China and you play only the dealer and not other players.

There are players, a dealer and a banker for a total of seven spots at the Pai Gow table. The players each get dealt seven cards and must form two separate hands in an effort to beat the banker. The banker’s role switches to another player every hand. The banker can also be the dealer. The dealer plays the hand like any other player when not the banker. Each player bets and the whole deck is dealt as each player gets seven cards.

The two hands each player makes is composed of five cards and two cards. The tricky part is the two-card hand must be lower in value than the five-card hand. It’s harder than it sounds because your first intention based on the standard rules of poker is to use the top pair but you can’t do this in Pai Gow.

The two hands of the player must beat that of the banker’s. The banker wins if the hands are equal. If one hand wins and one loses, it’s a push and you get your money back. The winning players get paid by the dealer from the banker’s funds. Thus, there can be more than one winning player. Losing player bets are paid to the banker. In general, the house takes a 5% commission on winning bets in Pai Gow Poker.

Rules of Five Card Draw Poker

Five Card Draw is the standard and most basic form of poker. There are tons of other variations out there like the popular Texas Hold’em and different forms of Stud Poker like Five Card Stud and Caribbean Stud. But before understanding any of those other games, you need to know the basics.

For Five Card Draw, each player must ante up, or put in a small wager to play the hand. Then, five cards are dealt to each player. Five Card Draw is similar to the betting of Texas Hold’em but doesn’t have community cards. Once the cards are dealt, the first round of betting proceeds. You must form the best poker hand and can discard however many you want from you hand. But there is only one round of discarding. The dealer collects the discards and issues new cards to those players. A second round of betting occurs. Players can raise and re-raise each other until everyone has called or folded. Then, there’s a showdown and the cards are revealed to determine the winner.

Sounds easy, right? Well, poker is a game of strategy. The best players know the odds of each hand winning in any scenario. Playing poker online is much easier than at a land-based casino where you must enter your name and wait for a table. At online casinos, you just click on a table to join and play with however much your deposited into your account. The tables will have different stakes. If you’re just starting out, play online first to learn the game since poker is a game of etiquette. You will learn when to place your bets and have lots of time to make decisions. Another benefit of online casinos is that you can move a lot faster. Once the hand is over, you can change seat or tables.