Here’s a new baccarat table with a difference, from Playtech.

It’s already available for play at a number of casinos including 888, bet365 and Dafabet.

It’s called Bet On Baccarat.

It involves a regular baccarat deal. That is to say, the same win conditions and third card rules. Players have the opportunity to bet on possible outcomes of this deal.

Simply choose your bet amounts, then select from a large range of bets under 4 categories:

1. Main Bets
2. Suits and Colours
3. Totals, and
4. Egalite

Bets are selected prior to the deal, and recorded on a bet slip right of screen.

There’s a good summary of all the Bet On Baccarat bets here.

The Main Bets are interesting. These are the bets we are most familiar with from a normal baccarat game. At the top of the list in this category, are the Player and Banker bets.

Regular baccarat players will know that the normal payout for a Banker or Player win is 0.95:1 (or 1.95x) and 1:1 (2x) respectively.

But on this new table, the Banker win pays 2.11 times! The Player win pays 2.17 times! You can see the payouts for these bet selections below.

Considering:

• the return to player rate of the Banker bet in regular baccarat is 98.95%, and
• this is essentially the same bet, on the same deal, and
• the payout is considerably higher, then
• it follows that this game should have an even higher theoretical return.

Unless of course there is a sneaky difference in the house rules that counteracts the higher payouts.

You guessed it. There is.

Here is a screen grab from the house rules, stating that you lose non-Tie main bets when there is a Tie.

In regular baccarat, Banker and Player bets push in the case of a Tie.

Slight tweak in the rules. Big impact on the return to player rate for those bets.

And as you can see, irrespective of which of the bets you take on this table, your theoretical return will be just under 97%.