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Super 6 Baccarat: Banker Six Pays Half — The Rule, the Real Cost and the Side Bet

Super 6 baccarat (also called no-commission baccarat or "Banker 6" baccarat) is standard punto banco with one change: the 5% commission on Banker is dropped, and in exchange a Banker win with a total of 6 pays only half. Every other Banker win pays a full 1 to 1. Some tables add a Super 6 side bet that wins whenever that half-pay hand happens. If you have seen a "Banker 6 pays 1:2" sign on a layout, or a table advertised as "no commission", this page tells you exactly what the rule does to your money, using the true probabilities from an exhaustive count of every possible 8-deck card order.

The rule in one table

Dealing, drawing and the third-card rules are identical to the standard game. Only the Banker payout differs:

On a $100 Banker bet that means a normal win pays $100 instead of $95, and a "Super 6" win pays $50 instead of $95. Player and Tie bets are untouched. Look for the rule printed on the felt; the wording varies ("Banker 6 pays 1:2", "Super 6", "no commission") but the arithmetic is the same.

How often does a Banker 6 happen?

Over every possible 8-deck shoe, Banker wins with a total of exactly 6 in 5.3864% of hands — once every 18.6 hands. That is 11.75% of all Banker wins: roughly one in every eight or nine Banker wins gets halved.

In an 80-hand shoe the average is 4.31 half-pay hands. The shoe-to-shoe spread is wide:

(Hands are treated as independent, which is how every figure on this page is computed.) Seven or more half-pay hands in one shoe happens 13.96% of the time — about one shoe in seven — which is why a Banker bettor can feel the rule biting hard on some nights and not at all on others.

What the half-pay costs: 2.69 points versus 2.29

This is the central trade. Dropping a 5% commission saves you 5% of every Banker win you collect. Averaged over all Banker bets (wins, losses and ties), the commission you hand over equals 2.293% of the money bet. The half-pay rule, by contrast, takes away half of a 1-unit win on 5.3864% of hands, which is 2.693% of the money bet. So the new rule costs about 0.40 percentage points more than the commission it replaced.

Notice the ranking flips. On a standard table Banker is the cheapest bet by 0.18 points; on a Super 6 table Player is cheaper than Banker by 0.22 points. The same 2.693% appears on our commission page as the break-even commission — the rate at which a Banker bet would cost nothing — and the half-pay rule is just another way of charging that same amount.

Worked example: $100 a hand for 100 hands

Betting $100 every hand for 100 hands puts $10,000 on the table. The average expected cost of each bet type, in dollars:

• Banker on a commission table: about $106.
• Player: about $124.
• Banker on a Super 6 table: about $146.

The standard deviation of a single Super 6 Banker hand is about 0.93 bets, so after 100 hands your result is typically within ±$1,820 of that average (95% range, $100 bets). Variance dominates the average in a short session: you can easily finish ahead after 100 hands on any of the three bets, but the longer you play the more the edge shows. Over 1,000 hands at $100 on Banker, the expected loss is $1,458 on a Super 6 table against $1,058 on a commission table — roughly $400 more for identical play.

The Super 6 side bet

The side bet is simple: it wins when the Banker hand wins with a total of 6, no matter how many cards it took. Common paytables are 12 to 1, and some tables offer 15 to 1. The fair payout, given the 5.3864% chance, is 17.57 to 1.

The formula is 1 − 0.053864 × (payout + 1). At 12 to 1 the bet costs about $300 per $1,000 wagered, twenty-eight times the Banker bet on a commission table. Even the generous 15 to 1 version costs more than the Tie bet at 9 to 1 (4.84%). If your table prints a different payout, plug it into the formula yourself. For a version that splits the same event into two-card and three-card wins with different prices, see tiger baccarat.

How Super 6 compares with its relatives

• Standard 5% commission — the cheapest Banker bet (1.06%). Some casinos round the commission up, which makes it costlier (see the commission page).
• Super 6 (Banker 6 pays half) — 1.46% on Banker and no commission arithmetic. Reasonable if you want simple payouts and mostly bet Player.
• EZ Baccarat — a three-card Banker 7 pushes instead. Edge 1.02%, a little better than commission tables; read EZ Baccarat for the exact counts.
• Tiger tables — the same Banker-6 half-pay rule as Super 6, with extra side bets named Small Tiger and Big Tiger. The main game is identical; the side bets are priced differently.

The variants overview places each of these in one comparison.

Practical points before you sit down

1. Read the felt first. Whether Banker 6 pays half is printed on the table; do not assume.
2. Know which bet is cheapest where. On a Super 6 table it is Player (1.24%). Overall it is Banker on a table with a normal 5% commission (1.06%).
3. Ask how odd amounts settle. A Super 6 win pays half the stake; with chips of whole dollars the table may round, and rounding changes the real edge.
4. Skip the 12-to-1 Super 6 side bet if cost matters to you. It is the most expensive thing on the layout.
5. Do not look for patterns. After a Banker 6 the next hand is no more or less likely to be one. Our baccarat strategy page explains why the previous hands give no usable edge on the next one.

To watch how often Banker 6 hands actually appear, follow a real shoe on the live baccarat tracker, or log hands yourself in the free Baccarat Scoreboard app. For other bet sizes and payouts, use the formulas above together with our baccarat analyzer.

Super 6 baccarat FAQ

Probabilities from exhaustive enumeration of every card order of an 8-deck shoe; per-shoe counts treat hands as independent — Baccarat Terminal, October 2026. Rules and paytables vary by operator. 18+. Informational only; not a gambling service.