Baccarat is a two-hand card game well known and respected in the casinos of Europe, but much less popular in North America and Asia. It is somewhat similar to Blackjack, in that the object is to win by getting cards with a higher combined value than your opponent’s.
However, in this case Aces count only as one point (not eleven), tens and face cards have no value at all, and the best possible total for a hand is nine, rather than twenty-one.
In fact, for totals of ten or more, only the last digit counts, so a hand of 6+5 is not eleven, it is one (ignoring the tens place), and a total of 7+9 is just six, not sixteen. Newcomers are often confused by the game’s strict rules of play as well as its similarity to other games with the same roots, such as Chemin-de-fer and Punto Banco.
But as expert card players know, Baccarat is one of the few forms of gambling in which the house advantage is extremely low. The secret of success is to know the rules, carefully watch what cards have been played, and apply that knowledge to your bets.