The course
Three lessons, read in order, cover everything that happens at a punto banco table. None of them needs any maths beyond adding two numbers together.
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How a hand works
The aim of the game, what each card is worth, why only the last digit counts, how naturals end a coup and how winning bets are paid. Finishes with a few habits for a real table.
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The third-card rule
The Player rule, the Banker rule when Player stands, and the full Banker tableau for when Player draws, set out as a table and then in words, with three worked hands.
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House edge and odds
How often Banker, Player and Tie come up, what the house edge on each bet is, why the tie is expensive and why no pattern, streak or staking system changes the arithmetic.
A short history of the game
The name is usually traced to the Italian baccara, meaning zero, a fitting word for a game in which tens and court cards count for nothing. Card games of this family were being played in Italy and France by the late Middle Ages or soon after, though the early record is thin and some of the colourful origin stories you will read are hard to confirm.
By the nineteenth century the French had two well-known versions. In chemin de fer the bank passes from player to player around the table, and players make real decisions about drawing. In baccarat banque one person holds the bank for longer. Both reached the gaming clubs of London and the casinos of the Riviera, and chemin de fer became a fixture of British clubs once casino gaming was legalised in the early 1960s.
The game taught on this site, punto banco, removed the decisions altogether: the house banks every hand and the drawing rules are fixed. It took shape in Latin America and reached Las Vegas around the end of the 1950s. Today it is by far the most common form of baccarat, and in Macau it brings in more casino revenue than every other table game combined.
The squeeze, where cards are bent back slowly to reveal them, is a much more recent habit, associated above all with high-limit rooms in Asia.
When you have finished the lessons, the glossary is a handy place to check any term you meet later.