How to read baccarat roads

The five roads at a glance

Evolution describes its tables the same way: the Bead Road and Big Road show past results, and the Big Eye, Small and Cockroach roads show patterns derived from the Big Road.

Bead Plate and Big Road

The example shoe on this page has 30 hands: B B P P P B T P B B B P B T P P B P P P B B T B P B B B P P (B Banker, P Player, T Tie). It is made up to illustrate the rules.

The Bead Plate fills from the top-left corner, six hands to a column, and keeps every hand in the order it was dealt.

The Big Road starts a new column each time the winning side changes, and adds to the same column for as long as that side keeps winning. A Tie gets no cell of its own; it is drawn as a green line across the ring before it. When a run passes six rows it turns right along the bottom row, a shape players call a dragon tail.

The derived roads: red and blue are not Banker and Player

Big Eye Boy, Small Road and Cockroach Pig use red and blue in a different sense: red means the Big Road is repeating a pattern, blue means it broke one. Each road compares the newest Big Road entry with a column to its left, one, two or three columns back. There are two cases:

• The entry starts a new column. Compare the column just finished with the column the road looks back to (for Big Eye Boy, the one before it). Equal lengths give red; different lengths give blue.
• The entry continues a column. Look at the compared column at the same row. The mark is blue only when that column stops exactly one row above the new entry; otherwise it is red.

Each derived road starts once there are enough columns to compare: Big Eye Boy at the second row of the second column (or the top of the third column), Small Road one column later, and Cockroach Pig two columns later. The marks are laid out the way the Big Road is: a new column whenever the colour changes. Wizard of Odds' guide to baccarat score boards uses the same rules, and counts a long run at its full length rather than the six rows a board can show.

Working through the example

The first marks of the example shoe, each worked out from the Big Road above:

1. Hand 4 goes into row 2 of column 2. Big Eye Boy looks at column 1, one column to the left, which has 2 entries: it does not stop exactly one row above the new entry, so the mark is red.
2. Hand 5 goes into row 3 of column 2. Big Eye Boy looks at column 1, one column to the left, which has 2 entries: it stops exactly one row above the new entry, so the mark is blue.
3. Hand 6 starts column 3 of the Big Road. Big Eye Boy compares column 2 (3 entries) with column 1 (2 entries): different lengths, so Big Eye Boy marks blue.
4. Hand 8 starts column 4 of the Big Road. Small Road compares column 3 (1 entry) with column 1 (2 entries): different lengths, so Small Road marks blue.
5. Hand 9 starts column 5 of the Big Road. Cockroach Pig compares column 4 (1 entry) with column 1 (2 entries): different lengths, so Cockroach Pig marks blue.

What roads cannot tell you

Roads are a tidy record of the shoe so far, and they make a table's history easy to scan. They do not record which cards were dealt, and every hand is decided by the cards the dealer draws under the same drawing rules. A run of red on Big Eye Boy says the Big Road has been regular; it does not make the next hand any more likely to follow it. The baccarat guide at mega63official.com covers the drawing rules and the three bets, and the other live card game is explained in Dragon Tiger, one card each.