Online Baccarat

At online casinos, you’ll always find a table games section. Here, you’ll find games such as blackjack, roulette, poker, and baccarat.

Baccarat usually has a few offerings, but it is always there, both in standard table game fashion and in a live dealer setting, where live dealer games are available.

Best Online Casinos To Play Baccarat

This in-depth guide will help new players who are acclimating themselves to this game type. Online casino players typically gravitate to blackjack and slots, so becoming better at baccarat is an area of the market that you can become more well-versed in and win some cash!

So, if you’re ready to learn about baccarat, take your game to the next level, and play as optimally as possible, continue reading our guide outlined below!

Optimal Online Baccarat Strategy

Never Bet On A Tie: As outlined in the rules above, ties can often payout at a much larger rate. However, this is not a bet to make. Generally speaking, the house has a much larger edge when betting a tie, upward of 14 percent.

So, the best bet (no pun intended) is to stick to the banker or player hand wagers.

Bet the Banker: While the commission could be imposed for the banker winning, there is a mathematical advantage. On the player hand’s, the house generally has an advantage of 1.24 percent. With the banker, the house has a 1.09 percent advantage.

Statistically and mathematically speaking, the banker’s side is always the best bet, even with the commission.

Ignore “Baccarat Czars": Once you start looking into ways to win baccarat, there will be people claiming to be professionals with a winning strategy. The fact of the matter is that this does not exist. There are strategies to remember, but those are from the point of view of math and statistics.

There’s not much you can do to increase your chances of winning outside of following the numbers.

Play Demo/Free Modes: While baccarat has elements of chance and luck, you can still learn plenty from playing demo modes. You’ll be able to notice some trends and the pace of the game. Baccarat is a very fast-paced game, and you can find yourself losing more money if you don’t act quickly on your feet.

You’ll get used to this pacing by playing demo modes, and when it comes to the actual game, you’ll be better at snap decisions.

Baccarat Rules

Often labeled as the casino game for wealthy bettors, baccarat at its core is easy to play. The other aspect that makes baccarat an attractive game to play is the slight house edge.

Let’s walk through the rules of baccarat.

• With baccarat, there are three different bets you can make. You will decide whether you believe the player’s or banker’s hand will win or if there will be a tie.
• After bets are placed, two two-card hands are dealt. One hand is for the banker, the other for the player.
• The cards from each will be added together.
• The goal in baccarat is to see which hand gets the closest to 9.
• Beyond the two cards, a third card can be drawn by the player, banker, or both. However, that depends on the rules of the Baccarat game you are playing.
• All 10’s and face cards are counted as zero.
• All other cards are counted as their face value.
• When adding the cards together, the total cannot be higher than 9. If the total is 10 or more, you will subtract 10 to determine the hand’s value. For example, if you have two 8’s, you have 16. This means your hand total is now 6.
• If the initial two cards drawn has a total of 9, this is dubbed a “natural," and that hand automatically wins.
• If the initial two-card hand does not add to nine, the next best total to look for would be 8. This hand is also considered a “natural."
• If the dealer and player end up with the same hand, that is a tie.
• Betting and winning on the player hand is paid in even money
• Betting and winning on the banker’s hand is paid in even money. There is sometimes a commission on the winnings, though.
• Betting and winning on a tie results in payouts as large as 8:1.
• Remember, baccarat is strictly a guessing game, and no real initial skill is needed.

Online Baccarat Vs. Live Baccarat

Generally speaking, there aren’t that many fundamental differences between online and live, in-person baccarat. The only differences are aesthetics in terms of being there in person versus at home, stakes are generally larger in-person, and the dealer controls the game’s speed when you’re in person.

At live casinos, the dealer will typically deal 120-150 hands per hour with mini-baccarat.

Beyond these differences, the game is all the same!

Real-Money Baccarat Vs. Free Baccarat

Players can find baccarat at free online casinos. These are also called social or sweepstakes casinos. These casinos are where players don’t actually play for real-money on a game-in, game-out basis, but rather for larger sweepstakes prizes.

The difference between these and real-money baccarat is really just the conditions under which you win money, wherever baccarat is available. The game of baccarat remains the same.

Another way to play baccarat for free is with demo modes. Demo mode is available at certain online casinos, which allows you to play the real-money version of the game, but no money is involved whatsoever. This could help prepare you for the actual game.

With real-money casino games such as baccarat, you can play different versions, including the live dealer options. There is minimal strategy involved with the game, and there are different risks depending on the particular types of bets, so you can feel the losses much quicker playing baccarat for real-money versus for free.

Playing Free Online Baccarat

Among the top social casinos—Chumba, Global Poker, LuckyLand, and Funzpoints—Baccarat is currently not available. So, you can play online baccarat for free as a demo version at real-money casinos.

Unfortunately, demo mode isn’t available everywhere, but it can be found by finding the game and seeing if demo mode is available.

Play Baccarat At Real-Money Casinos

While many states have technically legalized online gambling, fewer states have online casinos deployed. These states include New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and more recently, Connecticut. Online, real-money baccarat is available at online casinos in all of these states.

Live Dealer Baccarat

Live dealer games are becoming more and more popular with online, real-money casinos. In general, baccarat will always be available as a live dealer game with at least one table for it allocated.

Playing baccarat in a live dealer setting is as close to being in the brick-and-mortar casino as possible. You will have a live feed to the casino, where you will see a real, live dealer carrying out the game in front of you.

This is all handled via a studio in the casino.

You can interact and ask questions to the host/dealer in real-time through chat options and other mechanisms. Minus talking to the dealer face-to-face, this gives you the most authentic baccarat experience around, absent being there physically in person.

Playing Baccarat For Beginners

So far, we’ve gone over a bunch of rules and strategies. You can play however you want, but of course, if you want to win money more often, there are ways to do so.

To condense it down, new players should go to a table and bet on the banker. If you notice a run on the player’s hands, walk away until the streak dies. When the streak of player’s hands win goes away, get back in the game and bet on the banker.

How Do Baccarat Casino Bonuses Work?

With online casinos, you’ll find plenty of promotions offered that give you free money to play baccarat with. Even though you can play for free, with baccarat no deposit bonuses and first deposit matches, there could be things such as wagering requirements required.

The wagering requirement for Baccarat bonuses is the number of times you must wager the initial deposit (on deposit bonus welcome offers) plus the bonus amount. These are typically in the 10x range but can be lower or higher.

These are important to keep in mind because until the wagering requirement is met, you will not be able to withdraw the bonus funds received in cash form.

History Of Baccarat

Baccarat dates way back to Italy in the 1400s. It is believed to have been created by Felix Falguiere. Falguiere originally referred to the game as “baccara,” meaning “zero” in Italian. He decided on this name because of the value of the face cards, and ten were worth zero.

As the game continued to grow in popularity, it traveled to France, where it adopted the name “baccarat” that we know today.

The reason Falguiere developed the game is quite curious, but remember, this was the 1400s.

Falguiere developed the game based on old Etruscan folklore that had to do with a virgin needing to throw a die with nine sides. If she threw the dice and got an eight or nine, she would have been promoted to a priestess. If she rolled a six or seven, she would live but would lose all her priestly roles in the community. However, anything less than a six meant an ill-fate for this folklore character.

With this dark and eccentric past behind it, baccarat ventured to America and into Las Vegas in the 1950s by Tommy Renzoni.

Baccarat did not see the type of success roulette and slots did, so casinos started marketing it in a way that made baccarat appear to be a high roller game only.

Perhaps that marketing tactic worked because, in 2017, casinos in Macau saw over $33.2 billion in activity on the game.