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The History of Baccarat: How a French Salon Game Became Punto Banco

The history of baccarat is the story of one simple idea — draw cards, keep only the last digit, get closest to nine — being reshaped again and again by whoever was dealing it. The game moved from a private contest where players held the bank and made choices, to a casino game where the house banks every hand and nobody makes a single decision after the bet. Knowing that path explains a lot about the modern table: why the Banker bet pays a commission, why the drawing rules are fixed, and why Asian tables are covered in scoreboards. This page separates what is documented from what is legend, because a surprising amount of the popular story cannot be traced to any source.

Where did baccarat originate?

The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain. The story repeated on many casino sites says baccarat was invented in 15th-century Italy by a gambler named Felix Falguière and was first played with tarot cards. No contemporary document supporting this has been produced, and historians of card games treat it as legend. What is reasonably clear is the following:

• The name. The word is usually linked to the Italian baccarà and the French baccara, both used for a worthless or "zero" result. That fits the game: 10, J, Q and K count as zero, and a hand totalling zero is still called "baccarat" today.
• France is where it is first well recorded. By the 19th century baccarat was a fashionable game in French clubs and casinos, played in the two forms described below.
• It belongs to a family of "closest to nine" games. Several older European games used the same last-digit counting, so looking for a single inventor is probably the wrong question.

The three classic forms side by side

Most of the confusion about baccarat's history comes from the fact that "baccarat" has meant three different games. The table compares them on the points that matter to a player.

The name chemin de fer ("railway") is usually explained by the way the shoe travels around the table like a train, from one banker to the next. In both French forms money moved between players and the house earned a fee. When casinos turned the game into punto banco they took the bank themselves — and the 5% commission on Banker wins is the descendant of that fee.

Scandal and fiction: why baccarat looked glamorous

Two episodes fixed baccarat's upper-class image in the English-speaking world. In 1890, at a country house called Tranby Croft, a guest named Sir William Gordon-Cumming was accused of cheating at baccarat in a game that included the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. Gordon-Cumming sued his accusers for slander in 1891 and lost; the prince was called as a witness, a public embarrassment that made the game notorious in Britain.

Sixty years later, Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), built its central scene around a high-stakes game of chemin de fer. Bond plays the old player-banked form, not the punto banco you will find today, which is one reason screen versions often look different from a modern casino table.

Punto banco: the version the world plays now

Punto banco is commonly said to have developed in Latin America — accounts usually point to Argentina and Cuba — and to have reached Las Vegas around 1959, credited to the Sands casino. The changes were radical: the casino banked every hand, the drawing rules for both hands were written into a fixed table, and the player's only choice became which side to back. Because the Banker hand acts after seeing whether the Player drew, it wins slightly more often, which is why the commission exists. Under the modern rules on an 8-deck shoe the outcomes are fixed by arithmetic: Banker wins 45.86%, Player 44.62% and Tie 9.52% of hands, and the house edge is 1.06% on Banker and 1.24% on Player. Our page on baccarat rules has the full drawing table.

The removal of decisions is the single most important change in the game's history. In chemin de fer a careful player could make slightly better choices than a careless one; in punto banco skill has nothing to act on, and the only things that change a long-run result are which bet you choose and how much you stake.

Timeline

Asia, the squeeze and the scoreboard

The biggest shift since Las Vegas is geographic. In Macau baccarat became by far the largest source of casino table revenue, and Asian players brought customs that changed how the game looks. The squeeze — slowly bending a card to reveal its pips — turned each hand into a small ritual. Scoreboards became central too: the bead plate, the big road and the derived roads record every result of the shoe, and many players watch them closely. None of these customs changes the probabilities. A squeezed card was decided when the shoe was shuffled, and the roads record the past rather than the cards still in the shoe.

The online era then multiplied the variations. Speed tables cut the time per hand to about 25–30 seconds, and new games added side bets and multipliers on top of the punto banco core — compare them on our pages about baccarat variants and live baccarat.

What the history means for players today

• The commission is a historical fee, not a penalty for picking the "right" side; Banker remains the lower-edge bet even after paying it.
• Punto banco has no skill element left, so any system claiming to restore one is selling something the rules removed decades ago.
• The scoreboards are a cultural tradition. If you enjoy them, the live baccarat tracker draws them automatically for real tables, and the free Baccarat Scoreboard app lets you record a shoe by hand the way players once did on paper cards.

Baccarat history FAQ

Historical dates follow commonly cited accounts; where accounts differ we say so. Probabilities and house edges from exhaustive enumeration of an 8-deck shoe — Baccarat Terminal, October 2026. 18+. Informational only; not a gambling service.