Set the commission and Tie payout your casino uses, then see the true edge on every bet and what it costs you over a session. The numbers come straight from our baccarat rules engine.
The Banker bet has the lowest edge - the safest long-run choice.
| Bet | Payout | House edge | Loss per £100 | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Banker | 1:1 (less 5% commission) | 1.06% | £1.06 | Lowest edge - the long-run pick |
| Player | 1:1 | 1.24% | £1.24 | Close, but always a touch worse |
| Tie | 8:1 | 14.36% | £14.36 | Avoid - over 13x the Banker cost |
The house edge is the share of every stake the casino expects to keep over the long run. A 1.06% edge means that, on average, you lose about £1.06 for every £100 wagered on Banker - not on any single hand, but across thousands of them. It is the most honest measure of which bet treats you best.
Banker is almost always the lowest-edge bet, even after the commission, because the third-card rules give it a slight statistical advantage. The Tie looks tempting at 8:1, but its edge is more than ten times higher - which is why it drains a bankroll fastest. No bet has a positive expectation; the calculator simply shows which loses least.
The win, lose and push probabilities behind this tool come from the same 8-deck engine that powers our odds explorer and trainer, so the figures never disagree. For each bet the edge is:
For Banker at 5% commission: a 0.4586 win paying 0.95 against a 0.4462 loss gives (0.4462 × 1) − (0.4586 × 0.95) = 0.4462 − 0.4357 = 0.0106, i.e. 1.06%. Change the commission or Tie payout above and the calculator re-runs the same formula live. Assumptions: 8 decks, standard drawing rules and independent hands.
Read the full house-edge guide or test a betting system against real variance.
It is the percentage of every stake the casino keeps on average over the long run. Banker sits near 1.06%, Player near 1.24% and Tie around 14.36% - so baccarat (on Banker or Player) is one of the lowest-edge games in any casino.
On the maths, yes - it has the lowest edge at every standard commission, because the third-card rules give it a small statistical advantage. It is never a positive bet, just the one that loses least.
A tie is rare, so the 8:1 payout does not come close to covering the odds against it. That gap is the ~14.36% edge - more than thirteen times the cost of Banker over a session.
It changes the size of the Banker edge (a 4% commission drops it to about 0.60%), but Banker stays the lowest-edge bet unless a no-commission variant adds its own deductions. Set your casino's commission above to see the exact figure.
No. Martingale, Paroli and the rest only reshape short-term swings - the long-run edge is fixed by the rules. Our simulator shows the real bust risk they carry.
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