History
For now, it’s not crystal clear how the game emerged. There are still heated discussions as for its origin. What is known for sure though is that ‘baccarat’ means zero in two Roman languages – French and Italian. So, France and Italy are the countries each of which argues that the game was invented particularly in their state.
They say that the game might have been invented in the early 1400s by an Italian gambler Felix Falgurien, who first played it with the Tarot cards.
As for the earliest official mentioning of this card game, it’s considered that it was in the fifteenth century when the soldiers that were returning home after the end of the Franco-Italian War, which happened in the period when Charles VIII was ruling in France. Having learned about the game during the war from the Italian soldiers, French soldiers introduced it at home, in France.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when France was ruled by King Louis XIV, there was imposed a strong ban on gambling in the country. Yet the game didn’t vanish because of that. Quite the reverse. It was played in underground casinos as one of the most favourite games of the noble people.
After that, baccarat was mentioned in the nineteenth century as it was an extremely popular game among the nobility of France. During Napoleon’s rule, French nobility would play baccarat in private gaming rooms since casinos had not been legalized yet in that time.
Everything had changed since 1907 when gambling was made legal and Baccarat was officially introduced to French casinos. Quite soon, it started spreading around Europe and shortly after it became popular in the whole world.
The earliest type of the game was a Baccarat banque or Baccarat Deux Tableaux which was supposed to be played by three people. It was first mentioned in Album des jeux de hasard et de combinaisons en usage dans les salons et dans les cercles (in English, Album of games of chance and combinations used in salons and circles) by Charles Louis Van Tenac.
Quite soon, Baccarat banque evolved into Baccarat chemin de fer that was played by two people and was known as a zero-sum game.
In the 1940s, there emerged another version of this game, which is Punto Banco. This type of baccarat was first introduced in Havana. Basically, it was a house-banked game that allowed to bet either on the player or the banker. That was a true revolution of baccarat! Nowadays, Punto Banco is the way baccarat online is usually played.
In North America, baccarat gained extreme popularity only in 1950s. Since then, it’s available in every single American land-based casino. Nowadays, you can also easily find a really good online casino baccarat.
Owing to the technological revolution that was happening in the second half of the twentieth century, there emerged online casinos where now you can choose whichever baccarat online game you want and play it for as long as you like!
Nowadays, there are available many types and versions of this game. Whichever online baccarat casino you choose can offer you instant baccarat gambling as well as a downloadable version, mobile version, and even gambling with a live dealer on your PC, laptop, tablet PC, or even a smartphone!
Rules
So, how to play baccarat and win? First of all, you really need to learn the rules of baccarat before you even try to enjoy baccarat play online.
Many people play baccarat for fun since it’s quite simple and entertaining. Even beginners in the marvellous gambling universe can easily learn baccarat, specifically how to play it.
Nowadays, the game is played according to the revolutionary Punto Banco rules:
- So, there are two hands in the game – the player’s and the banker’s.
- Before the cards are dealt, you are supposed to place a bet predicting which hand you think will win.
- In order to avoid any kind of confusion, just be aware that the player’s hand is not yours, while the banker’s hand doesn’t represent the casino. All of the hands are equal to you. And you have no personal interest in none of them to win. You don’t really care whether the player’s or banker’s score is better. Your only goal is to make a bet predicting whose hand will win. That’s it. As simple as this.
- After all the bets are placed, two cards are dealt to each hand. The cards are dealt face down so that you can see them right away.
- As soon as the points are calculated, the result can be seen on the baccarat scoreboard. That’s basically how the winning hand is revealed.
- The more the score is of all the cards in the hand, the more winning chances there are for the hand. So, the hand with the highest score wins.
Be aware that all the cards have their own value that equals a certain number of points. In such a way, all the cards with numbers from two to nine have their face values regardless of their suit.
For example, two hearts is two points, five spades is five points, eight clubs is eight points, nine diamonds is nine points.
As for all other cards except for aces, precisely all tens, jacks, queens, and kings, they have no value at all, so basically if you get either of these cards you’ll get none extra points.
As you might have guessed already, there’s an exception. Aces. One ace equals one point.
The score of the hand is calculated based on the summarized points of all the cards. However, you must keep in mind that the maximum hand score is nine. You might wonder, how come? Well, the thing is that once the sum of your points exceeds nine, only the rightmost number counts. Still difficult? Let’s clarify everything based on the examples.
- For instance, if you have a two and five, your hand score is seven. That’s the simplest example, huh?
- If there’s a five and a king in your hand, the score is five. Quite evident, right?
- Ok, try it yourself now. If you have a ten and eight, how many points will you get? Mind it can’t be eighteen since the maximum is nine. And ten equals zero, so we can just disregard this card. So, the hand score in this case is only eight.
- Alright, now you have two aces. So, your score is two.
- The score is zero if you have a queen and king.
- Well, those examples were quite easy, yeah? There comes the most difficult part. What if you get a nine and five? What is the hand score?
- Don’t forget that nine is the highest possible score. So, what to do in this case? First, you summarize the points. Quite an easy math calculation, huh?
- So, nine plus five is fourteen, right? What would you do next? Come on, it’s not that difficult.
- What you need now is to recollect that only the rightmost number counts. In this case, the rightmost number is four.
- So you can just disregard one when you think of fourteen and leave the rightmost four. That’s your hand score in this case. It’s just four. Not that difficult after all, huh?
So, that’s basically how point calculations work in the baccarat system.
Top Strategies
The outcome of most games of luck can be mathematically calculated. That’s why there are different betting systems that work for such casino games, as roulette, craps, and, of course, baccarat. None of these strategies will tell you how to win at baccarat every round you play, yet if you follow whichever strategy, in the long term, you’ll only benefit.
Below are the top strategies that we recommend you to follow while playing online baccarat games.
Martingale Strategy for Baccarat Game
It’s one of the oldest strategies with a negative progression system. So, what it’s all about? The main idea is the following: you shouldn’t change the bet value every time you win, however, you are advised to double the bet every time you lose.For instance, you place $5 as the first bet. If you win, place $5 bet again. However, if you lose, make it $10. The next time you lose make the bet $20 etc. No matter how many times you lose, when you’ll eventually win you’ll be able to perfectly compensate for all the previous losses. Sounds unbelievable, huh? Let’s make some calculations then.Let’s suppose that you lose all the time.
First, you lose $5, then $10, $20, $40, $80 etc. evidently, you can’t lose all the time, so you’ll eventually win anyway. When you finally do win, your winning sum will equal a doubled bet. If the bet is $80, you’ll win $160. Even though you’ve lost $75 before ($5+$10+$20+40), you’ve still won $160, out of which $75 is simply a compensation for the lost bets, while $85 is the money you’ve made owing to the Martingale strategy. Sounds really cool, huh? Definitely worth trying!
Basically, it means that you never lose if you follow this strategy. Because no matter how much bets will turn out losing, you’ll still make more money than you have lost. Can the betting be endless then? Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. Eventually, you’ll either run out of money to place the bets or you’ll reach the casino’s betting limit, so you simply won’t be able to double the losing bet after all. That’s why we recommend that you employ the Martingale strategy only if your gambling session is really short and you don’t play many betting rounds. Otherwise, it won’t work.
Mind that we don’t recommend that you use this strategy if you choose to play speed baccarat or mini baccarat online because these games are played much faster, so you technically have a chance to get back your bets only if you play for less than an hour. Just for your info, you can play either real money or free online baccarat as many as approximately 120 rounds for just an hour.
Paroli Strategy
This betting system is absolutely different from the Martingale system since it’s a positive betting progression. This betting system is quite old, it was developed almost 400 years ago. Originally, it was designed specifically for the card game Basset, yet it can be used for quite a wide range of different card and table games, such as baccarat, roulette, craps, Sic Bo, Pai Gow poker etc. Like any other strategy, there’s no guarantee that you’ll inevitably win owing to this strategy, yet it’s quite easy to use and it’s sure to help you avoid substantial money losses.
The main peculiarity of this particular betting system lies in the fact that, first of all, you need to decide what’s your fixed stake that you’re gonna bet when each progression starts. It’s entirely up to you how much to bet. However, it’s recommended to start with a really low bet. Preferably, it should be about 2% of the sum you wanna wager. Wonder how it works? Well, it’s absolutely contrary to the Martingale system. You need to place the same bet value after a loss and always double the bet every single time you win.
While there’s also an option to double the bet only after you have had three wins in a row, it still makes sense to do it after each winning bet. In the table below, you can perfectly observe how this betting system works providing that your fixed bet is $1.
First bet |
Second bet |
Third bet |
Result |
$1, loss |
$1, loss |
$1, loss |
– $3 |
$1, loss |
$1, loss |
$1, win |
– $1 |
$1, loss |
$1, win |
$2, loss |
– $2 |
$1, loss |
$1, win |
$2, win |
+ $2 |
$1, win |
$2, loss |
$1, loss |
– $2 |
$1, win |
$2, loss |
$1, win |
0 |
$1, win |
$2, win |
$4, loss |
– $1 |
$1, win |
$2, win |
$4, win |
+ $7 |
Fibonacci
This betting system is mostly used by the roulette players, yet it’s also applicable for baccarat as well as any other casino game with odd and even bets. Basically, it’s a negative progression with quite a flexible approach owing to less aggressive increase of bets value.
This betting system is basically focused on a number sequence that is also known as the Fibonacci number sequence – 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 etc.The Fibonacci sequence might look quite weird and complicated to you since it’s not really straightforward, yet you’ll definitely find it easy as soon as you learn the main rule: each number from the sequence equals the sum of the last two numbers.
Still in vague? See our explanation of the suggested above Fibonacci number sequence. 1 plus 1 equals two. That’s how it appears in the sequence. The following calculations are quite logical as well: 1 plus 2 is 3, 3 plus 2 is 5, 5 plus 3 is 8, 8 plus 5 is 13, 13 plus 8 is 21, 21 plus 13 is 34, 34 plus 21 is 55, 55 plus 34 is 89, 89 plus 55 is 144, 144 plus 89 is 233, 233 plus 144 is 377 etc.
Fibonacci number sequence can literally be endless. You can make it as long as you wish. Usually, the Fibonacci number sequence starts with 1 when used for gambling, however it can also start with a zero. We don’t recommend it for betting though. Fibonacci number sequence is literally essential for mathematics and is also known as the nature’s number system.
In gambling, the Fibonacci betting system can be applied in such games as baccarat, blackjack, craps, and roulette. While playing baccarat, we recommend that you start the sequence with 1, so you need to bet one unit. If the bet is losing, move to the next number in the Fibonacci system and bet one unit again. If this bet losses again, move to the next number again until you finally win. In case of a winning bet, move two numbers and reduce the bet size as you move back two numbers. If your very first bet is winning though, bet one unit again starting the progression anew. Keep in mind that a unit is basically the sum of money you wanna bet in advance. Choose whichever sum you want, yet we do recommend that your bet doesn’t exceed either one or two percent of your total budget. If it does, there’s a high risk to lose it all.
Tips and Tricks
You might wonder what’s the best baccarat strategy, yet it’s rather challenging to decide since there are lots of them, so we recommend that you learn what online baccarat strategy options you have in order to decide which is the best option for you.
No matter what strategy you will eventually choose to follow, if any, of course, we have a few tips and tricks that will certainly turn out handy when you play online baccarat and probably will even help you figure it out how to win baccarat. At least, your winning chances are sure to be higher if you follow our recommendations listed below.
- First of all, we really urge you to read and learn all the rules so that you are comprehensively aware of all the game’s peculiarities as well as pitfalls to avoid.
- Do practice free baccarat online for as long as you manage to perfectly master your skills.
- There’s a plenty of different free online baccarat casino games on the web, choose whichever you want. Try different types to make sure you thoroughly polished your baccarat skills.
- Play baccarat online for fun and do your best to enjoy the gambling process before you start real money gambling. Remember it’s also supposed to be fun rather than commercial.
- After you’ve learnt everything about baccarat and the way it’s played as you’ve tried every single baccarat free online game, you can finally start gambling for real money.
- We strongly advise you against betting on the tie. It really makes no sense since the winning chances are quite low in this case. Instead, you’ll lose all your money before a tie turns up.
- In case you doubt on whom to bet, always choose the banker. It’s really the safest bet since the odds are more likely to be in your favor.
- Bet responsible. Set your budget first. Place small bets. In such a way, you can avoid heavy losses. Increase the bets only if the Lady Luck is really on your side.
- Never place a high bet on the baccarat table. Bear in mind that it’s just a game of chance, so don’t test your luck too carelessly.
- Stay reasonable and cool headed all the game.
- Good luck!