House Edge
Expected-value calculator
Pick the rules, set your stake, and see the real expectation of every bet — plus what an hour of play costs.
| Bet | Pays | Probability | House edge | Cost per hour | Total cost |
|---|
The house edge belongs to each individual bet. It does not care how you arrange stakes or when you change tables.
Method
Method
Probabilities come from eight decks with the full drawing rules: banker 45.86%, player 44.62%, tie 9.52%. EV = payout × win rate − loss rate; ties push. Under no-commission rules banker wins with 6 about 5.39% of the time, and that slice pays half.
How to read it
The only column that matters
House edge, not hit rate
People look at the hit-rate column, see banker at 45.86% against player at 44.62%, and conclude that banker is the better bet. The conclusion happens to be right; the reasoning is wrong. What decides the outcome is the house-edge column — how much of every 100 you stake comes back over the long run. Banker wins more often yet keeps only a 1.058% edge against you precisely because the 5% commission claws most of that gap back. The casino is not handing you the difference.
The hourly figure is the one you can feel
1.058% sounds small enough to ignore. Convert it to time and it stops sounding small: at 100 a hand and 70 hands an hour, betting banker has a mathematical expectation of −74 per hour. Four hours is −296. That number does not go away because tonight runs hot; it is merely hidden under variance, and variance is the part that reverts.
Side bets are a different order of magnitude
Tie and pair look generous — 8:1, 11:1. Put them in the same table and the gap is stark: tie at 8:1 carries a 14.36% house edge, more than thirteen times the banker bet. At the same 100 a hand and 70 hands an hour, an hour of tie betting has an expected cost of 1,005. Some casinos pay tie at 9:1, which drops the edge to 4.844% — still four and a half times the banker bet.
| Bet | Payout | Hit rate | House edge | Expected hourly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Banker (5% commission) | 0.95 : 1 | 45.86% | 1.058% | 74 |
| Player | 1 : 1 | 44.62% | 1.235% | 86 |
| Banker (no-commission Super 6) | 1 : 1 * | 45.86% | 1.458% | 102 |
| Tie | 8 : 1 | 9.52% | 14.360% | 1,005 |
| Tie (9:1 rule) | 9 : 1 | 9.52% | 4.844% | 339 |
| Pair | 11 : 1 | 7.47% | 10.361% | 725 |
* No-commission Super 6: the banker bet pays even money with no rake, but a banker win on a total of 6 pays only half. Banker wins with 6 on 5.3864% of hands, and that single clause more than swallows the saved commission — the house edge rises from 1.058% to 1.458%. "No commission" is marketing, not a discount.
Frequently asked
- What is the house edge in baccarat?
- It depends on what you back. Eight decks, standard rules: banker 1.058%, player 1.235%, tie at 8:1 14.36%, pair at 11:1 10.36%. Under no-commission Super 6 the banker bet is 1.458%. There is no single "house edge of baccarat" — only the house edge of a particular bet.
- If banker has the lower edge, why does the casino allow it?
- Because the 5% commission exists for exactly that reason. Without the rake, the banker bet would carry a +1.24% edge for the player and the casino would lose money on it. The commission flips a player-favourable bet into a house-favourable one at −1.058%, with margin to spare.
- Are these probabilities simulated or calculated?
- Calculated. All 416 cards are dealt one at a time without replacement through a full recursion covering every drawing branch — not a sampled simulation, so there is no error term. The probabilities of all outcomes sum to 0.999999999999; the remainder is floating-point rounding.
- Can table-hopping, waiting, or reading the road lower the house edge?
- No. The house edge is a property of the bet itself, fixed by its payout and its probability. It does not depend on when you bet, which table you sit at, or what came before. The only variable that changes your total cost is how much money you put through the table — stake size multiplied by number of hands.