Baccarat Roadmap

A baccarat roadmap is the grid of past results shown beside a live baccarat table. Most tables display five. The bead plate records each result in the order it was dealt. The big road starts a new column every time the winning side changes. The remaining three — big eye boy, small road and cockroach pig — do not record results at all; they record whether the big road itself has been repeating or alternating. They are a display, not information about the next hand. Each derived road is computed from the big road, which is computed from hands already settled, so nothing in the five grids is an input to the shoe. Removing cards from an eight-deck shoe does shift the edge fractionally, but far too little to be read off a pattern, and the roads do not measure it in any case. Their commercial purpose is straightforward. Roadmaps make streaks visible, and visible streaks encourage bigger bets on whichever side looks hot. That is the gambler's fallacy given a user interface. The numbers that do not move are the ones worth carrying: on a standard eight-deck table the banker bet holds about 1.06 percent and the player bet about 1.24 percent, hand after hand, whatever the roads show. The tie remains the worst bet on the table no matter how long it has been absent.