The Basis of Good Baccarat Strategy
There are a couple of basic things that you will need to keep in mind before you dive into the world of baccarat strategies. For one, you need to make it clear in your own mind what baccarat variant you want to play. Most of the strategies mentioned below will be universal across the board, but there may be some subtle differences between the games. Secondly – and arguably the most important thing to consider – is money management. You should always set limits on the maximum amount you want to win and the most you’re willing to lose.
Once you’ve set your limits and settled on the variant, the only thing left to do is to remain focused. This may sound easy but the thrill of the game is actually one of the biggest distractions, especially for new players. If you are to rise above amateur status, you will need to be able to concentrate on various different elements of the game as they happen. Make sure you avoid chasing losses at all costs too, as this can have implications on the strategy you spent time carefully devising. Being mindful of all of this and applying a level of patience will allow you to become a pro player gradually with time.
What is the baccarat basic strategy?
The basic baccarat strategy, also known as the flat betting strategy, is by far the best place to begin if you’re still relatively new to the game. This strategy plays off the fact that the banker bet has a slightly lower house edge than any other bet available to you. Taking this into consideration, the premise of this strategy is a simple one: focus all of your efforts towards betting on the banker from the start.
Think about it, the house edge for the banker bet stands at an attractive 1.06%, the player bet is slightly higher at 1.24% and the tie bet is much higher at 14.36%. Now, which one of these do you think is the best to place your bet on? The banker bet, of course. Even though this bet usually comes with a 5% commission paid to the casino, you are still more likely to win on it than on other bets. There’s a reason the casino includes this commission, after all!
If you choose to play using the basic strategy, simply keep placing your bets on the banker and completely ignore the player and tie bets. That’s all there is to it. You also don’t need to increase or decrease the amount you bet after each round, just bet the same amount each time. With the lower house edge, you will win more on this bet than on any other, so there’s some room to make a small gain in the short-run. The most important thing, as mentioned, is to remain mindful of your wagers and how much money you have won or lost.
Does baccarat card counting work?
Card counting is a strategy that was made famous on the blackjack tables. You may be thinking that this is a system for the mathematically gifted. On the contrary, card counting can be done by just about anyone. The only thing it requires is some simple addition and subtraction. The aim of this strategy is to determine who will receive a more advantageous hand in each round of the game. This is indeed something that is applicable to blackjack, but can you count cards in baccarat? Seeing as baccarat loosely follows the same gameplay structure as blackjack – two hands are drawn and the highest one wins – it is possible to use card counting when playing baccarat.
There are a number of prerequisites that must be met in order to get the most out of your card counting experience:
1. You absolutely must be playing at a table that uses a 6-deck shoe or an 8-deck shoe. No more, no less.
2. The shoe must be fresh when you start counting or the whole system will fall apart. The shoe changes roughly every 30 minutes in online live baccarat so if you join before this happens, just sit it out for a while. The worst case scenario is you have to wait half an hour to try it out.
3. Ideally, you should play at a table where the shoe is used the whole way through. Often this only happens in land-based casinos, however, you can still apply this strategy online.
Once you have met all 3, or at least the first 2, of these conditions, you’ll be ready to learn the ins and outs of card counting for baccarat. Let’s start off by going through the baccarat card counting formula. When you join a table that has a fresh shoe, start off your count at 0. The values of the cards that show up from here on will determine whether this will increase or decrease. See the table below for more details:
So, what exactly is the reasoning behind counting these numbers? You’re doing this so that you will know, after a couple of rounds whether it’s best to place a bet on the player or the banker. When the count is lower than 16, a banker bet is more favourable. Anything above 16 and you should place your bets on the player. You may be wondering how the tie bet comes into all of this. The simple answer is it doesn’t. Placing a bet on a tie will implicate a lot of things when you’re using this strategy, it’s best that you avoid it altogether.
So, the real question is whether card counting in baccarat is actually worth your time. It is and it isn’t. Card counting in baccarat, as you can see from its disadvantages, requires hours of your time to make a profit, a rather minuscule one at that. This is just not an option as you will be logged out of a table after a long period of inactivity. It is worth trying out though just to test your knowledge and hone your skills for other games such as blackjack.
What is Baccarat Pattern Tracking?
Pattern tracking involves keeping track of the outcome of all the previous rounds in a game of baccarat. This is done in the belief that you will be able to spot certain trends that can be used to your advantage to predict what hand is going to win next. This is based on the statistical evidence that player hands will win roughly 44.615% of the time, the banker will win 45.843% and a tie has a probability of winning 9.543% of the time. Taking this into consideration, you will be able to track when a certain hand is more likely to win over another.
Let’s put this into context a bit and see exactly how to use pattern tracking in baccarat. You’re playing a game of live baccarat and you’re keeping track of the wins along the way. On the eleventh round, the banker bet wins and you notice there has been one tie win (9.09% of the total wins), 4 player wins (36.36% of the wins) and 6 banker wins (54.54% of the wins). As you can see, the banker bet has gone over its statistical average by roughly 8.7%, while the percentages for the player hand is under by roughly 8.3%. Statistically speaking, you would expect that the percentages should eventually even out, so in this case, a bet on the player would make more sense.
One great thing about playing online live baccarat is that the wins are recorded for you in what is called the big road. This is displayed on the interface and includes a number of red, blue and green hollow circles in a grid. The red represents a banker win, blue is for player wins and green is for ties. Starting from the top left cell in the grid, the big road records down vertically. For instance, if a banker wins two rounds, you will see two red circles in the first column. If the player wins after this, a new column is started and this will continue down to record the entire player win streak. You can use this to your advantage to predict where the next win may be.
The 1-3-2-4 baccarat strategy explained
The 1-3-2-4 betting strategy is a type of baccarat progression strategy that plays off the fact that the odds for winning on either the banker or the player is a roughly 50/50 split, meaning each bet pretty much has even odds. A variation of the 1-3-2-6 betting strategy and was first introduced to the world of gambling back in 2006 by Fortune Palace. This is a very easy strategy to follow and is a favourite of beginners and pros alike.
So, how exactly do you use the 1-3-2-4 gambling system? The principle is rather simple: you bet 1 unit on your first round, 3 on the second, 2 on the third and 4 on the fourth. You only progress to the next number in the sequence if you win a hand. If you lose, you will begin again from the start. Each number represents the amount of units you will wager. Let’s keep it simple and say 1 unit is €1. If you manage to win all four rounds, you will come out the other end with a tidy profit of €10. Not bad at all. Let’s have a look at an example of this system played out over a number of rounds. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that each of the below bets is placed on the player as the payout is exactly 1:1.
Example with a Starting Bankroll of €50
As you can see from the above example, this strategy has a lot of potential to negate your losses. What’s more, you could potentially combine this strategy with one of the previous ones mentioned above to further increase your odds in live baccarat. Pretty nifty, right?
Other progressive baccarat betting systems
The 1-3-2-4 betting strategy above is just one of many different strategies that fall under the umbrella term of progressive betting. Progressive betting is a very simple, very effective way of making some small wins in the short-run. It works on the premise that the result of a round will determine how much you bet in the next one. Positive progression systems require you to increase your wager by the same amount after each win and decrease it by this amount when you lose. For negative progression systems you will increase after a lose and decrease after a win.
While these are more suited for roulette games, they can be applied to pretty much any bet that has even odds, so why not try them out in live baccarat too? The 1-3-2-4 strategy is by far the best to use when playing baccarat, but there’s no harm in applying the others too and testing them out. If you’d like to learn more about this type of betting system, check them out in the roulette strategies page.
Well, there you have it. You’re now completely versed in all the different strategies that you can use to improve your performance when you’re playing live baccarat. Well done! Keep in mind that these will not guarantee that you will win though. The only real way of beating baccarat is by understanding your limits and knowing when is the best time to leave the table. Saying that, applying these strategies, combined with an understanding of how the game works, will definitely increase your odds. The only thing left to do now is to try out some of these strategies for yourself!
Baccarat betting strategies are key to your game
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