From the sticky-floor California card rooms of the golden age to the tuxedo-clad casinos of Monte Carlo, Baccarat has transcended social boundaries and continues to enchant players worldwide. Although the game may seem intimidating to newcomers, baccarat is one of the easiest casino games to learn and master. Baccarat has few rules, no complicated strategies and a single, simple decision: Player or Banker?

The objective of baccarat is to bet on the hand whose total value will come closest to nine. Two cards are dealt to each hand; the values of the cards are added and the winner is determined by which total comes closest to nine. Picture cards and tens are worth zero points; the values of numbered cards from 2 to 9 are added together, and the ace counts as one point.

Baccarat’s popularity has boomed in recent decades thanks to Asian high rollers, who have made it the most played casino game in Nevada and many other jurisdictions around the world. Several factors have contributed to this growing interest in the game, including its relatively low house edge (1-1.5%), its low minimum bet ($10), and the fact that it can be played with a single deck of playing cards.

Another factor contributing to the rise of baccarat is its cultural appeal. For example, many Asian gamblers find certain numbers lucky or unlucky; the number 4 is considered very bad luck due to its similarity in pronunciation to the word for death in Cantonese. Therefore, wise casino executives remove the number four from the baccarat table layout.

In addition, baccarat tables often use pre-shuffled cards to speed up the introduction of new decks into the game. The normal procedure for introducing a new deck of eight cards into the game is to have them inspected, backs and faces, by both the floor supervisor and the dealer. Then, they are scrambled or washed together and inserted into a shuffling machine, or manually shuffled by the dealer.

Pre-shuffled cards can be inserted into the shuffling machine or manually shuffled by the dealer without the time-consuming inspection process. They also help reduce the incidence of counterfeiting and other security issues. To further speed up the introduction of the pre-shuffled cards into the game, a few casinos have even begun to use an additional final machine shuffle on top of the re-shuffling. This additional step is more costly than simply using the cards from the factory, but it has eliminated several baccarat-related game protection problems and added a level of customer confidence in the card control process.