All rounds of a baccarat tournament have three very defined phases|GOLD99
1.early
2.go in the middle
3.Late (I like to call it “death”)
Let’s work backwards. “Death” lasts only one round, and is the last round of the round. After the hand, all chips will be counted and the winner will be determined. This is the most important hand of the round.
The exact start of the middle stage depends in part on the relationship between the maximum bet, the average stack size, and the relative stacks of certain key players before and after the start of the middle stage. It even depends somewhat on the position of the “first bet” marker (see Part A for an explanation of the “first bet” marker) and where that marker might be in relation to your position at the time of death. All that aside, you can usually safely say that the middle starts with about 10 hands. When in doubt about exactly when the middle begins, the mistake is to make the middle last too long rather than too short. There’s nothing worse than running out of time in a tournament. The middle lasts until the penultimate hand (or GOLD99penultimate hand) of the round. This penultimate hand is by far the most important in the middle.
Early action is just everything before mid-term action. In the extremely unlikely event that a round lasts less than 10 hands, there is no possibility of it being played earlier.
The strategies for each stage are very different, so it’s important to know which stage you’re in. So how do you know how many hands are left to play?
Track hand|GOLD99
It’s a little known fact that the average number of cards used in a baccarat hand (call it a baccarat “coup” if you want to get fancy) is 4.94 cards. This number is very close to 5, which makes sense considering that only 4, 5 or 6 cards can be used in a baccarat hand. As an approximation, you can say that each deck has 10 hands.
When starting out with a shoe, pay careful attention to a few things:
How many decks are in the shoe.
The exact location where the dealer places the cut card to indicate the penultimate hand (this may be different from where the rules say the dealer should cut the card).
How many cards are “burned” from the top of the shoe.
Some things to keep in mind:
Usually before the game starts, the dealer burns (discards) a card from the top of the shoe, then burns as many cards as the blackjack value of the first card, where Ace is 1 and not 11 (for example, if the first card is a 5, he burns five more cards, if the first card is a Q, he burns another ten cards, and if the first card is an Ace, he burns another open).
Unlike blackjack, in baccarat, when the cut card occurs, it usually means another hand is coming – so you can always know for sure when the last hand will be, but you might be a little confused Determine which hand is the penultimate hand (until you know it’s actually in it, by which time you’ve already bet on that hand).GOLD99
Using all this information, you can estimate how many hands are in the shoe, and count down. Let me give you an example. Assume that eight decks of cards are used for the round — that’s 416 cards (or roughly 83 hands). We noticed that the dealer was very careful to cut about ten cards from the back (or 2 hands). The card burned was a king, and the dealer burned the top ten cards of the shoe (the other 2 hands were gone). Now we start playing. For sure, 79 hands (give or take 1 or 2 hands) will be played before the cut cards come out. The first 69 will be early, the next 10 will be middle, and the last hand (after the cut) is dead.
Of course, you are provided with pen and paper at the baccarat table! If you want to be very precise, instead of counting hands played, you can actually mark each card as it is dealt! Honestly, this level of precision isn’t really necessary.
Now you’ve learned how to know exactly which stage of the game you’re in at any given moment: early, mid or late. Each stage requires a different strategy. We’ll start discussing these strategies in Part C of this series.