How to Control the Pace of Baccarat Games

Janak9955

Baccarat's popularity is steadily increasing worldwide. Today, in the North American gaming industry, the baccarat sector generates disproportionately high revenue shares, far exceeding other games, which is not uncommon. This applies to both high limit and quality areas. The soaring financial performance of baccarat is mainly due to high player attendance and high bets, with one of the lowest house edges for the banker, and the game's pace is famously slow.

Seeking Solutions
A few years ago, we managed a busy baccarat business in North America, striving to address the issues of low HE (House Edge) and low RPH (Revenue per Hour) in baccarat by introducing the following changes:
- Adding side bets with higher HE.
- Changing the payout table for selected tie winners. This new attractive payout table incentivized participation in the tie with a very high HE, as discussed in this article.
- Introducing a baccarat commission-free variant widely used in Asia, where the banker wins at odds of 1:1 unless winning with a '6' pays odds of 1:2.

The commission-free variant proved highly successful as it addressed two slow variables:
- HE: The primary bets of baccarat for the banker and player increased from 1.15% to 1.35%.
- RPH: Significantly improved the game speed, as our dealers no longer needed to make complex calculations and countless checks to pay commissions.

Success Breeds Success
This success was impressive! Our baccarat win/day and win/opening hour increased by 21%, and the hold rate increased by 1.1 percentage points. So we began to look for more ways to optimize baccarat revenue. In this process, we realized a clear but largely overlooked understanding: baccarat is the only game on our gaming floor where the player determines the pace of the game. Baccarat players bet slowly because they need time to think and "predict" the outcome of the next hand. This ritual is part of the nature and appeal of the game, and we cannot truly force valuable players to bet faster. However, this does not mean we have to give up control of the pace of the gaming. After all, in this article, we will introduce the framework I implemented, which successfully further improved the financial performance of baccarat by speeding up the pace of the game.

Ritu77

This also needs to be grasped well.