Baccarat Rules and Variants

The live baccarat limits we could see without an account ran from $1 to $10,000 at Loto-Québec’s Speed Baccarat A, and 888casino in Ontario showed a $2 minimum at Speed Baccarat 1 and Super Speed Baccarat. PlayNow, PlayOJO and BetRivers list live baccarat but show limits only after login. The rules we could read agree on the basics: eight decks, Player paid 1:1, Banker paid 0.95:1 after a 5% commission, Tie paid 8:1, and a published return of 98.94% at both Loto-Québec and PlayNow. We checked on October 19 and 20, 2026.

What this section covers, and why

Baccarat’s drawing rules are fixed, so you make no decisions after betting. What changes from table to table is the price: the Banker commission, the Tie payout, the number of decks, the limits and the pace. Those details sit in each table’s rules and on its table page, not in its name. This section records them for live tables available to players in Canada and shows what each difference costs.

How is a hand decided?

You bet before the cards come out and make no choices afterwards. Two cards go to the Player hand and two to the Banker hand. Tens and picture cards count 0, aces 1 and the rest at face value, and only the last digit of the total counts, so 7 and 8 make 5. A two-card 8 or 9 is a natural and ends the round. Otherwise a third card may be drawn by fixed rules; Loto-Québec’s rules say the third-card rule applies when the first two cards total 0 to 7. The total closer to 9 wins, and equal totals are a tie, which returns Player and Banker bets.

Where did we find live baccarat, and at what limits?

Two things stand out. Loto-Québec is the only casino in our check that publishes both the limits and the rules of a live baccarat table without login. And the maximum, $10,000 at Loto-Québec, is the only one we could see anywhere.

What changes the price from table to table?

The Banker commission. At 0.95:1, Banker has a house edge of about 1.06%, which is where the 98.94% figure comes from. Without the commission, Banker would favour the player by about 1.24%, so a table sold as “no commission” has to pay some Banker wins at less than even money instead. Read which ones.

The Tie payout. At 8:1, a Tie bet loses about 14.4% of every bet on average. With eight decks, a tie comes up about 9.52% of the time: 0.0952 × 8 minus 0.9048 is minus 0.1436. If a table paid 9:1, the figure would be 0.0952 × 9 minus 0.9048, about minus 4.8%. Either way, Tie costs far more than Banker or Player.

Decks and pace. Every table whose rules we read uses eight decks. “Speed” tables play more rounds per hour, so the same edge costs more per hour at the same stake. On 100 Banker bets of $10, $1,000 in total, the expected cost is about $10.60, however fast those 100 rounds come.

The guide in this section

How to play casino baccarat explains how hands are counted, when a third card is drawn, what each bet pays at Loto-Québec, and why Banker at 0.95:1 still costs less than Player, with the arithmetic for each bet.

How we checked

We read Loto-Québec’s Speed Baccarat rules and table page and PlayNow’s Live Baccarat rules on October 19, 2026, and the logged-out live casino pages of 888casino, PlayOJO and BetRivers from an Ontario connection on October 20. Limits are those shown on a public page. Anything shown only after login is marked as not shown. Amounts are as the casino displays them.

What we could not confirm

• Limits at PlayNow, PlayOJO and BetRivers: shown only after login.
• Maximum bets at 888casino’s baccarat tables, and the rules of those tables.
• Side bets at the tables we checked: we did not record them.

Check a baccarat table yourself

Open the table’s rules and find the Banker payout, the Tie payout and the number of decks. Then look at the table tile or bet panel for the minimum and maximum. With those numbers, the calculations above tell you what each bet costs. Our page on how live dealer games work explains the betting window and what happens when a round is voided.