The History of Baccarat: From French Courts to Live Dealer Tables
Baccarat started as a card game for French aristocrats and now plays out on streamed tables people open on their phones. Five major rule changes happened along the way, and the man photographed dealing it at the Sands in 1959 went on to buy into a Lake Tahoe landmark.
Few casino games have traveled as far as baccarat.
It started out in French salons in the 1800s, and a century later it was the game holding up Macau’s casino industry. Online casinos are its newest home.
Smokos, an online casino for Australian and New Zealand players that launched in August 2026, is one of the newer places it’s dealt. After registering, players use the Smokos login to get into a live casino lobby that lists Dynasty Speed Baccarat from Pragmatic Play Live next to Evolution’s Dragon Tiger, a one-card spin-off of the game.
It took about 170 years of rule changes to get here, and not every step is well documented.
Where Baccarat Started
Ask a dealer where baccarat comes from and you’ll probably hear about 15th-century Italy, or soldiers bringing it to the French court of Charles VIII in the 1490s. Neither story has much evidence to back it up.
Mathematicians Stewart Ethier of the University of Utah and Jiyeon Lee of Yeungnam University went looking for that evidence in their paper on the evolution of baccarat, first posted in 2013. The earliest written mention they found is in an 1847 French book on salon and club games.
Their explanation for the gap is simple enough. Baccarat was played almost exclusively in aristocratic circles, so it rarely appeared in print.
Two versions came first. Baccarat banque was a three-person game, while chemin de fer cut it down to two players, with the Banker role rotating around the table. By 1880 the name chemin de fer, French for “railway,” was in common use.
French clubs had bills to pay. Their fix was a five percent commission on Banker wins, and five percent wasn’t random, it was easy to work out in your head without slowing the game down. The study’s math also suggests a cut much above 5.5% would have left nobody wanting to be the Banker.
Havana Rewrites the Rules
Chemin de fer was a game of choices. Player could take a third card on a five or stand pat, and the Banker had options of his own.
But Cuba stripped those choices out.
In pre-revolutionary Havana during the 1940s and 1950s, the casino started banking the game, so anyone could bet on Player or Banker. Tommy Renzoni opened the baccarat game at the Capri around 1956. He later wrote that his revised rules turned it into a game of pure chance. Ethier and Lee credit him with the rule that forces Player to take a card on five, which was the last real decision left at the table.
This version, punto banco, went from Havana to the Sands in Las Vegas in November 1959. Celebrities got involved fast. A UNLV Special Collections photograph dated that month has Frank Sinatra dealing baccarat in the Sands casino.
Sinatra, Tahoe and Casino Royale
Ian Fleming had already done his part for baccarat’s image. The big hand in his 1953 novel Casino Royale is a chemin de fer-style game, with James Bond beating Le Chiffre nine to eight. Technically it wasn’t true chemin de fer, since Le Chiffre bought the Banker role instead of letting it rotate, though it took two mathematicians to point that out decades later.
Sinatra’s next casino venture was much closer to home for Tahoe readers. In 1960 he bought into the Cal Neva Lodge in Crystal Bay, the 1926 resort with the California-Nevada state line painted across its pool and casino floor.
There’s no solid record of baccarat being dealt at Cal Neva in those years, and it’d be a stretch to claim otherwise. What the North Shore lodge and the Sands did have in common was the Rat Pack crowd, who turned casino gaming into a glamour product for a generation of American travelers.
The lodge closed in 2013, and its sale to McWhinney started the redevelopment now planned for the Crystal Bay site.
Macau and the Numbers
Punto banco arrived in Macau in 1962. By 2013, the territory’s 35 casinos were bringing in about US$45 billion in gambling revenue, and over 91% of it came from baccarat, per UNLV Center for Gaming Research figures cited by Ethier and Lee.
Their explanation is mostly economic. With the house banking both sides, bets aren’t capped by what one Banker is prepared to risk. A game can also start with a single player at the table, with no waiting around for a full lineup.
Fairness counts too. The authors describe punto banco as “almost unique among casino games” because players see it as fair while it still pays well for operators.
On the numbers, the house edge works out to about 1.06% on Banker bets and about 1.23% on Player, based on the study’s calculations. Banker wins are paid at 19 to 20. That’s the old five percent commission from the French clubs, just dressed up differently.
Baccarat’s timeline, in short:
| When | Where | What changed |
| First half of the 1800s | French salons | Baccarat banque, a three-person parlor game |
| By 1880 | France | Chemin de fer, a two-person game with a rotating Banker |
| Early 1900s | French clubs and casinos | Five percent commission on Banker wins becomes standard |
| 1940s–1950s | Havana | House-banked punto banco with fixed third-card rules |
| November 1959 | Las Vegas | Punto banco debuts at the Sands |
| 1962 | Macau | Punto banco arrives in Asia |
| Today | Online live studios | Streamed dealers and speed formats |
Live Dealer Tables Today
Live studios left the Havana rules alone and changed the room instead. A dealer works a physical shoe on camera while players bet from a phone or laptop.
Speed versions cut the gap between rounds. Dragon Tiger goes further, stripping things down to one card per side with no third-card rules to learn at all. Side bets pop up around the edges too, though the core Player-versus-Banker bet hasn’t changed since Havana.
Smokos is a good example of where the game’s ended up. Its brand voice is blunt and a little raunchy, a long way from the tuxedos at the Sands in 1959. And it doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Baccarat is one corner of a 700+ game lobby that also covers slots from Pragmatic, Hacksaw Gaming, Play’n GO and Nolimit City. For players at its live baccarat tables, Smokos offers:
- Play in the browser on any device, with no app needed
- Accounts in local currency for Australian and NZ players
- With bank cards and e-wallets for deposits, plus crypto like BTC and ETH
- 24/7 live chat and email support
- Instant withdrawal processing, with funds usually arriving within minutes once identity verification is done
A wallet holds either fiat or crypto at any one time, and players can switch once the balance is at zero.
Responsible Gambling
Speed baccarat moves fast. Set a budget before the first hand, not halfway through a losing streak when every decision feels urgent.
Smokos lets players set deposit and loss limits, plus wager caps, from their account profile. A lower limit applies right away. Increases are different and only kick in after a 24-hour cooling-off period. Time-outs go from one day up to three months, and self-exclusion is available from three months up to permanent.
Gambling is for adults 18+ and is entertainment, never a source of income. Only bet what you can afford to lose.
