Baccarat Strategy – Can You Count the Cards in Baccarat?

While card counting is a well-known phenomenon in blackjack, some players are aware that a number of lessons have been taken from the subject of card counting in baccarat as well.

Given that tracking numbers is already a popular pastime on the baccarat table, an effective card counting system may even be easy to use without being detected; after all, as far as the casino could tell, you were just going to do the same superstitious calculations everyone else was doing.

Believe it or not, it’s actually possible to get an edge by counting cards while playing baccarat, mabosway is telling us how to do it.

While it may not be immediately obvious, getting a card off the deck does affect a player’s or banker’s chances of winning a card in the future, so when a card is removed from the shoe the odds keep changing.

For those who are curious, removing the six has the greatest effect in favor of the player’s bet (with five and seven out of the deck also quite helpful), while removing four from the deck will tilt things in the banker’s favor. While you usually never bet on a tie, eliminating eight, nine and zero (ten) will make the tie more likely.

Will Counting Cards In Baccarat Give You the Advantage?

Sounds simple, right? As you may have guessed, there are some pretty significant catches here.

The card ejecting effect is very, very small. In addition, the effects of the various cards are not neat.

In blackjack the difficulty of counting cards is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can use a simplified system that rates all cards as +1 or -1 (even more complex systems use very few values).

In baccarat, to get the full value of your card tally, you have to add and subtract the three or four digit numbers in your head constantly to keep the tally accurate.

There is also the issue that the house edge in baccarat starts off slightly higher than in most blackjack games (around 1.06% on banker bets, and 1.24% when betting on players).

This is still fine compared to most casino games, but the slightly bigger advantage and the minuscule effect that each card has means you’ll rarely find a situation where your tally will give you an edge: one estimate puts the profit bet frequency at one in every 475 hand.

Even if you calculate perfectly with the aid of a computer program that can constantly calculate the exact change in odds, and can bet hundreds or even thousands of dollars just on those rare hands when you have an edge without the casino becoming suspicious, you will most likely just be making a few cents per hour.

It might be fun to do just to say you beat the casino at baccarat, but it should also show that realistically, baccarat isn’t a game where card counting is a winning strategy.

Read also our article about 7 Kinds Of Game In Online Casino.