Playing Mini-Baccarat

20 April 2023

By Royal Flushes

CINDY: A game we play and like very much but one we haven’t written much about is mini-baccarat.

ABBY: In some parts of the country mini-baccarat has a large field of players. You will see it is one of the favorite games of Asian players. Many Asian rooms in casinos will have high-limit mini-baccarat tables.

CINDY: One thing is true now; you won’t find many or any of the old traditional baccarat games.

ABBY: Oh, sure, the long table with totally comfortable seating and several dealers – well-dressed dealers too! – servicing the game. The minimums when we saw those games in the late 1990s and early 2000s were $100! Not too many people could afford those minimums. On some weekends some casinos had $200 minimums. The players were also betting thousands a hand; it was a big money game for sure. Maybe a James Bond game.

CINDY: The traditional baccarat game – that old BIG-bac game we could call it now – had an elegance about it. I haven’t seen one of those games in over a decade.

ABBY: And now mini-bac thrives. You’ll still find that in some high-roller rooms $50 and $100 minimums still rule. Some of those tables get big action too.

CINDY: The rules for mini-baccarat are the same as they were for big-baccarat. You have a choice of three bets, the banker, the player and the tie. The house edges on the bets shows an interesting spread. The player bet has a 1.24 percent house edge, the banker bet has a 1.06 percent house edge and the tie bet – forget about the tie bet please! – has a house edge in the 14 percent range. On the bank bet, instead of being paid one-to-one as you are on the player bet, the house takes a five percent commission.

ABBY: Why is the bank bet like that? Because it actually wins more than 50 percent of the time! In order for the house to make money on that bet it has to charge a five percent commission.

CINDY: If you happen to come to a mini-bac table that doesn’t charge a commission by only pays one-half of the banker bet on the six then the house edge soars up to almost 1.5 percent.

ABBY: Mini-bac is a guessing game. Which bet do you want? That’s it. You choose the bet that will win. It is not a game that requires any skill at all. Since the banker bet wins more often than the player bet I tend to bet only the banker. Think of it as a coin flip with one side of the coin hitting more often than the other side.

CINDY: A 1.06 percent house edge on banker is better than a 1.24 percent house edge on player. So betting banker is the way to go.

ABBY: When the hands are dealt there is a whole somewhat complicated hit and stand rule for them. Does that mean the players have a say in what is a hit and what is a stand? No. They don’t. It is all automatic. The dealer will hit and stand for the hands. The players spend that time –

CINDY: Praying, I guess.

ABBY: There are two major differences between big-bac and mini-bac. In big-bac the players get to deal the cards. That is fun but has no impact on the outcome of the game. But fun is fun!

CINDY: Now to the bad difference. Mini-bac is a fast and sometimes super, super fast game. Dealers handle everything. It is quite possible to see 150 hands dealt in an hour! Indeed, it is low house edges combined with an amazing number of hands and now those low edges still can cut deep.

ABBY: You do not want to play more than 90 to 100 hands per hour. Just sit out hands as if you are figuring out what to bet. You don’t have to protect yourself against the house edge but you do have to protect yourself against the speed of the game.

CINDY: And no side bets either. Just play banker or player, not ties, and you might find this to be an enjoyable game.

ABBY: We do.