The Baccarat Third Card Rule: Complete Drawing Chart for Player and Banker

2026-10-05

The only decision you make at a baccarat table is which side to bet on. Once the cards are out, neither the Player nor the Banker hand chooses anything — the dealer follows a fixed chart, and nobody at the table can deviate from it.

This page lays out that chart, and then adds something you will not find in the usual explanations: how often each rule actually fires, computed by exact enumeration over an eight-deck shoe.

The short answer

• The drawing rules are fixed. There is no decision point anywhere in the hand. Learning them helps you follow the table, not win more.
• A third of all hands never reach the drawing rules at all: 34.30% of the time one side shows an 8 or 9 on the first two cards and both hands stand.
• The Player hand draws a third card 50.34% of the time and stands (on 6 or 7) only 15.35% of the time.
• Exact enumeration over eight decks gives Banker 45.8597%, Player 44.6247%, Tie 9.5156%. Checked against 1.8M real hands, all three agree to within 0.03 percentage points.

Step 1: check for a natural

Add the first two cards and keep only the last digit — 7 + 8 = 15 counts as 5.

If either hand totals 8 or 9, both hands stand and the deal is over. That is a natural.

So roughly one hand in three at the table skips everything below.

Step 2: does the Player hand draw?

With no natural, the Player hand acts first. This part is simple:

How often: draws 50.34%, stands 15.35%, natural 34.30%.

Step 3: does the Banker hand draw?

The Banker side splits into two cases. This is the only genuinely fiddly part of baccarat.

Case A: the Player hand stood (Player total 6 or 7)

The Banker hand then uses the same simple rule the Player hand does:

Case B: the Player hand drew a third card

Now the Banker decision depends on its own total and on the value of the Player’s third card. Columns are the Player’s third card:

You do not have to memorise it. The pattern: the higher the Banker total, the less helpful the Player’s card has to have been before the Banker keeps going. On 4 it needs a 2–7; by 6 it only accepts a 6 or 7.

How often each rule actually fires

This is the part we computed ourselves — the probability that each rule decides the hand, across all deals:

The point jumps out: the three genuinely awkward rows (Banker 4, 5, 6) together account for only 17.6% of hands. Most deals either end on a natural or hit a Banker total too low to do anything but draw.

How many cards a hand uses

The Player’s third card is most often a zero

Zero dominates for a dull reason: 10, J, Q and K all count as zero, which is 16 cards per deck — four times any other value. It is also why the Banker stands on 4 and 5 when the Player draws a zero: that card most likely did not improve the Player hand at all.

Checked against real hands

Exact enumeration next to 1.8M real dealt hands:

All three land within 0.03 percentage points — squarely inside sampling noise. Two things follow: real tables really do run these rules, and our enumeration is not wrong.

What this means for how you play

Nothing. That is the point.

Memorising drawing rules pays off in blackjack because you have decisions — hit, stand, split, double — and the wrong choice costs money. Baccarat has none of that. The rules fix every step. From the third card to the payout there is not one moment where your judgement enters.

So the house edge lives in the rules, not in the play. Betting Banker loses about 1.06 units per 100 wagered over the long run; Player about 1.24. Both numbers are locked in before you place the chip, whether or not you can recite the chart. The derivation is in the real probabilities and the house edge, and you can run the numbers for different rule sets in the house edge calculator.

Data and method

• Exact enumeration, not simulation. Eight decks, 416 cards (10/J/Q/K count as zero, 128 of them; values 1–9, 32 each). Cards are dealt one at a time without replacement in a recursion that exhausts every drawing path. The probabilities sum to 1.000000000000.
• The result matches the published theoretical values for eight-deck baccarat exactly, which vouches for every other number on this page.
• Real data: Evolution live baccarat, 107 tables, 3–11 September 2026, 27,510 shoes and 1,801,127 hands. Always 8 and Always 9 variant tables are excluded (different rules), as are shoes flagged as incomplete.
• Percentages are given to two decimals; the comparison table keeps four.

This site does probability and statistics only. It gives no betting advice. 18+. If gambling is affecting your life, please seek professional help.

Read next: The real probabilities and the house edge · How to read baccarat roads · How common are long streaks