Walk into a casino in Copenhagen, Vienna or Macau and the baccarat table will almost certainly be punto banco. "Punto" is the player hand, "banco" the banker hand, and the crucial feature is that neither side chooses anything — a fixed drawing table decides whether a third card comes, every time.
That makes it the purest bet in the casino: you are picking which of two predetermined hands wins. The prices are what they are, and we derive them from a full walk of the 416-card shoe: banker exactly 1.0579% after the standard 5% commission, player 1.2351%, and the tie a far more expensive proposition. The commission page shows why the banker bet would actually favour the player without it.
Chemin de fer and baccarat banque, the older forms where a player may choose to draw, survive mainly in a few French and Monte Carlo rooms. If a table is simply labelled "baccarat" in Las Vegas or on a European floor, it is punto banco.
Where the numbers come from
Related terms in casino floor
- Commission — A percentage charged on winning bets that would otherwise favour the player.
- House edge — The average share of each bet the casino expects to keep over the long run.
- Shoe — The box holding several shuffled decks from which cards are dealt.
- Natural — A hand that wins immediately on the first cards dealt.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.