Pick a spot, place your chips, and let the cards decide, in Baccarat you wager on the outcome, not the play.
This is Punto Banco, where the drawing rules are fixed and automatic. You only choose where to bet, then deal and let two hands resolve themselves against each other.
Nobody can tell you where baccarat came from, and the confident stories should be read with that in mind. One tradition has it carried into France from Italy at the end of the 15th century by soldiers returning from the Italian Wars under Charles VIII; another puts the game no earlier than the 19th century. The origins are genuinely disputed, not merely unrecorded.
The card historian David Parlett points instead at Macao, a game that reached Europe at the end of the 18th century and was played across every class, as baccarat's immediate precursor. Its name and rules hint at sailors bringing it back from Asia, where related games had been played since the early 17th century.
What is beyond dispute is the company it kept. Declared illegal late in the 19th century as a game of almost pure chance, it stayed wildly popular in high society — to the point that the future Edward VII was compelled to testify in court over the royal baccarat scandal of 1890, after a player was accused of cheating at a country house in Yorkshire.
Baccarat is a faithful, free recreation of the traditional Punto Banco card game, played for chips with no real money involved. This original build runs in your browser with a daily shoe and free-play mode.