Counting cards at baccarat

Is Baccarat a "countable" game? In other words, is it possible to gain an advantage by card counting?

Certainly, since the behaviors of the Player (Punto) and the Bank (Banco) are different, the game can be defined as NOT SYMMETRICAL. This means that the removal of each individual card will lead to differences in the expectations of the various chances.

The table below shows how the win percentages of the three chances in Baccarat (Punto Banco) vary when removing a card from an 8-deck shoe:

To provide more applicable indications for hypothetical card counting, we propose the table below, where scores are assigned to each individual card. Note that the card scores are different for each of the three chances. Therefore, a hypothetical counter would need to keep track of 3 counts! However, since the counts for Player and Bank are almost opposite, one could just follow one of them.

The higher the value assigned to a card in each count, the greater the benefit for that chance when that particular card is removed from the shoe. In simple terms, when many low cards are drawn, the Bank is favored; when many high cards are drawn, the Player is favored.

A hypothetical counter in Baccarat (Punto Banco) should therefore perform a "true count" (see the blackjack section for the differences between true and running count) by assigning the scores below to the cards. They should expect to reach a break-even situation with the Bank at the following values:

• Bank: 1058
• Player: 1235
• Tie: 14360

It is easy to verify that these values are reached in much less than 1% of hands!

Without delving too much into the math, we can state that even a perfect player (using a handheld computer), playing every hand with appropriate bet variations (bet spread), would only manage to reduce the house edge, bringing it down to just under 1%! And this puts to rest the claim that card counting can at least allow you to play at break-even.

To gain a real advantage, one would need to engage in so-called "back-counting," i.e., playing only when conditions are favorable. But even then, one would play so infrequently, and with such minimal advantages, that Punto Banco remains a non-countable game. This statement has been thoroughly demonstrated for years by great mathematicians such as E. Thorp (The Mathematics of Gambling) and Peter A. Griffin (The Theory of Blackjack).

From our side, using a statistical method (generators), we have further confirmed that in Baccarat (Punto Banco), it is NOT WORTH COUNTING. Playing €1000 chips only in favorable conditions, on average, one would not exceed a profit of 60 cents per hour, with significant deviations!