How to play
This is the Macau-style three-card game, and it’s much simpler than regular baccarat. Nobody draws a third card under a rulebook: Player and Banker each get exactly three cards from a single 52-card deck, and the better hand wins. The deck is shuffled fresh before every hand.
- Choose a chip (20, 100, 200 or 1,000) and tap Player, Tie or Banker. You can put chips on more than one spot. A spot takes 20 to 1,000 credits in steps of 20.
- Press Deal. Three cards go to Player, three to Banker, and each side’s label shows its points and how many face cards it holds.
- The result line names the winner, and winning bets are paid.
Undo takes back your last chip, Clear empties the table and Rebet repeats your previous bets. A short history strip records recent results.
Reading a hand
Card values are the usual baccarat ones: Ace is 1, 2 to 9 count their number, and 10, Jack, Queen and King count 0. Add the three cards and keep only the last digit. 8 + 7 + Q = 15, which is 5 points. A hand can never be worth more than 9.
Hands are then ranked in this order:
- Three faces. Any three of Jack, Queen and King beat every other hand, even 9 points.
- Points. Higher points win.
- Face count. If both hands have the same points, the one holding more Jacks, Queens and Kings wins. So 6 points made with K + 2 + 4 beats 6 points made with 10 + 2 + 4.
- If points and face count both match, it’s a tie.
That third step is the easy one to miss. A 10 is worth zero like a face card, but it isn’t a face, so it never helps in a tiebreak. Two hands of 9 points can be split by a single Queen.
Payouts
| Bet | Wins when | Pays |
|---|---|---|
| Player | Player’s hand ranks higher | 0.95 to 1 |
| Banker | Banker’s hand ranks higher | 0.95 to 1 |
| Tie | Both hands rank the same | 25 to 1 |
When the hand is a tie, Player and Banker bets are handed back. The 0.95 payout is a 5% commission taken from every winning side bet, which is also why the minimum stake is 20: it keeps every payout a whole number.
The odds
Since both sides get three cards and neither has any special rules, Player and Banker are mirror images. Counting every possible pair of hands from one deck:
| Result | Chance |
|---|---|
| Player wins | 48.11% |
| Banker wins | 48.11% |
| Tie | 3.78% |
| Bet | Return | House edge |
|---|---|---|
| Player | 97.59% | 2.41% |
| Banker | 97.59% | 2.41% |
| Tie | 98.17% | 1.83% |
A few other numbers from the same count: a single hand is three faces just under 1% of the time, about one deal in 100. Every point total from 0 to 9 comes up close to 10% of the time, so there’s no “usual” score to expect.
Strategy
There’s very little to decide here, and it’s better to know that than to chase patterns.
- Player and Banker are the same bet. Unlike Baccarat, where Banker has a small built-in advantage from the drawing rules, the two sides here are perfectly even and pay the same commission. Pick either.
- Tie is the lowest-edge bet on the table, with a 1.83% house edge against 2.41%. The catch is volatility: it hits less than 4 hands in 100, so expect long dry spells between 25 to 1 wins.
- Betting both Player and Banker guarantees you pay the commission on one side and lose the other, about a 2.4% loss per round for no upside.
- Streaks don’t predict anything. The deck is reshuffled every hand, so the history strip is for interest only.
For a different single-deck game decided by one card per side, there’s Dragon Tiger.
If you enjoy Three Card Baccarat, try Three-Card Challenge or Three Digit Draw next.
