A Beginner’s Guide to Baccarat

Baccarat is a game of choice for the elites and wealthy. It combines the trappings of a high-stakes casino game—smart dressers, bourbon-fueled clout, and Bond-dipped mystique—with Zen-like minimalism: players wager on either the player hand or the banker hand; the side whose total is closest to nine wins. It is a simple game, but its popularity has grown to the point that it now constitutes a significant part of casino revenue.

This is especially true in Las Vegas, where a single player can take down the entire house’s quarterly earnings by placing massive bets in just one session. In 2000, Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer dropped $20 million in a single baccarat session, and the game’s long-term take from the Las Vegas Strip casinos has never recovered from that blow.

In addition to betting on a player win or banker win, a third option is a tie, with the player and banker holding hands that are both dealt and revealed simultaneously. Gamblers may also place high-risk side bets on a player pair or banker pair, which have a higher probability of winning and pay out at 9 to 1, independent of the regular bets. Simultaneous bets on the player and banker are prohibited.

Six decks of cards are shuffled together, and players are seated around an oval table in random order. The croupier (dealer) deals three cards for both the player and the banker, with specific drawing rules determining which hand will have a greater chance of winning. The croupier will then proceed with the following steps:

Depending on the variant, the dealer might also announce a tie rule that requires both players to bet on the same outcome in order for the banker to win. Players must then decide whether to accept this bet and make a new player bet, or pass on the opportunity. The croupier will then draw a new card for both the player and the banker, and declare whichever hand has a number closer to nine as the winner.

Previous research has found that baccarat gamblers tend to follow trends—or, more precisely, the expectation of a future outcome that is positively correlated with a preceding event. This is known as positive recency, and it has been shown to influence gambling behavior across a wide range of games. However, the current study is the first to quantitatively analyze the determinants of positive recency in a real-world gambling environment using large-scale field data from a casino. The results show that baccarat gamblers follow trends and expect future outcomes to be positively correlated with past outcomes, even though these results are unpredictable. This provides new insights into the factors that promote positive recency in gambling and has implications for cognitive modeling of probability learning. This is in stark contrast to the negative recency phenomenon observed in other contexts, such as a multi-prize lotteries.