Blackjack vs Baccarat: Which Has Better Odds, and Why It Depends on You

How each game works, in brief

Blackjack

You play your own hand against the dealer. Cards count at face value, face cards count 10 and aces count 1 or 11. You aim to beat the dealer's total without going over 21, and you decide on every hand whether to hit, stand, double, split or surrender. If you're new, start with how to play blackjack.

Baccarat

In punto banco, the version you'll find in most casinos, two hands are dealt: one called Player and one called Banker. Despite the names, you are neither. You simply bet on which hand will finish closer to 9, or on a tie. Tens and face cards count zero, and only the last digit of a total matters, so 7 and 8 make 5.

Then the casino plays both hands by a fixed table of drawing rules. Nobody at the table decides whether a hand takes a third card. Once your bet is down, your part is over.

The odds, side by side

For baccarat, the standard eight-deck figures are well established. For blackjack, we use our own measurement: millions of rounds of perfect basic strategy through BlackJack Streak's rules engine, at our default rules (six decks, dealer stands on soft 17, double after split, late surrender, blackjack pays 3 to 2).

Read that table from the top and the pattern is clear. A blackjack player who knows basic strategy faces the lowest edge in the room. A blackjack player who guesses, or copies the dealer, faces an edge four or five times worse than the baccarat Banker bet.

Why the Banker bet is better than the Player bet

Baccarat's fixed drawing rules let the Banker hand act last, with information about whether the Player hand drew a third card. That small advantage means Banker wins slightly more often. The casino balances it by taking a 5% commission from winning Banker bets, which still leaves Banker as the better of the two. That is why math-minded baccarat players simply bet Banker every time and ignore the patterns on the scorecards.

Decisions: where the two games really split

This is the heart of it. In baccarat, once you've chosen Banker, Player or Tie, nothing you do afterwards changes the result. Wizard of Odds, the long-running casino math site, describes it as about as simple as betting on the flip of a coin.

In blackjack, your decisions are the house edge. Our simulations show what's at stake:

• Perfect basic strategy: about 0.4% of every bet
• Copying the dealer's rules: 5.6%
• Never risking a bust: 6.05%
• Choosing at random: 42.9%

So blackjack rewards learning and punishes guessing. Baccarat does neither. Which one suits you depends on whether you see decisions as fun or as stress. At BlackJack Streak, the game buttons light up gold whenever a decision is waiting on you, so you always know when it's your move. If you want to know how much learning blackjack really takes, our guide on how hard blackjack is breaks it down.

Can you count cards in baccarat?

Technically yes, practically no. Analyses of baccarat counting put the gain at only around 0.05% of the house edge, nowhere near enough to matter. Blackjack is different: tracking the cards already dealt can swing the edge toward the player when the remaining shoe is rich in tens and aces. It takes real effort, but it's why blackjack is the game card counters choose. BlackJack Streak deals from a six-deck shoe with a cut card, so you can practice counting there for free. Learn the basics in our guide to counting cards online.

Pace: how fast each game moves

Casinos track how many hands an hour their tables deal so they can rate players. In figures published by Wizard of Odds from a major Las Vegas Strip casino, blackjack runs at about 70 hands an hour and baccarat at about 72. That's close to identical, so pace doesn't change the comparison much: the edge per hand does.

Here is what that means if you bet one unit on every hand for an hour:

These are long-run averages, not predictions for one evening. Any single hour can go either way, and long streaks are normal in both games.

Why high rollers love baccarat

If blackjack offers the better odds to a skilled player, why do the biggest bettors so often head for the baccarat pit?

• No skill to get wrong. The edge on Banker is the same for a beginner and an expert, so a big bettor can't be outplayed.
• It's fast to bet big. One decision per hand makes it easy to move large amounts quickly.
• The setting. Full-size baccarat tables are often in roped-off, high-limit areas, where single bets can run to tens of thousands of dollars.
• It's huge in Asia. Baccarat is the leading table game in Macau; in 2014, punto banco accounted for around 91% of Macau's casino income.

Blackjack, by contrast, is the game of people who like to think about each hand. It's also the one you can play alone at home, free at BlackJack Streak, and get better at.

So which should you play?

• Choose blackjack if you're willing to learn basic strategy. It gives you the best odds in the casino and a game that rewards practice.
• Choose baccarat if you want to make no decisions at all. Bet Banker, skip the Tie, and accept a slightly higher edge in exchange for simplicity.
• Avoid the baccarat Tie bet at 8 to 1, and avoid playing blackjack by gut feel. Those are the two worst options in this whole comparison.

Whatever you decide, the best way to learn blackjack is with nothing at stake. BlackJack Streak is free, runs in your browser, and has no chips for sale. Comparing more games? See blackjack vs roulette, blackjack vs poker and blackjack vs teen patti.

Sources

• Baccarat basics: rules, probabilities and house edge, Wizard of Odds
• House edge of casino games compared (including hands per hour), Wizard of Odds
• Baccarat, Wikipedia (punto banco rules, Macau share, card counting)
• Blackjack figures at BlackJack Streak's rules: our own simulations through the game's rules engine