How to read baccarat roadmaps: bead plate and big road

2026-09-24

Under every live baccarat table there are grids full of circles. Those are roadmaps: pictures of the results so far. The two you will look at most are the bead plate and the big road. Draw the same shoe both ways and the difference is easy to see.

Bead plate: exactly in order

One real shoe (69 hands) drawn as a bead plate.

The rule is simple. Starting top left, fill each column of six cells from top to bottom in the order the hands came, then move to the next column. Player is blue, banker red, tie green.

Every hand gets one cell, so it is easy to count hands, and ties sit in their real position. What is hard to see at a glance is whether the same side kept coming.

Big road: shows the streaks

The same shoe drawn as a big road.

The big road exists to show streaks. It has three rules.

If the same side comes again, mark it in the cell directly below. When the side changes, start a new column to the right, at the top. A tie takes no cell; it is marked as a green slash over the previous circle.

When a column runs past six cells there is no room to go further down, so it turns and continues to the right along the bottom row. That bent part is usually called the tail, or dragon tail.

Reading both together

On the bead plate a shoe may look like red and blue mixed together; on the big road you see at once whether it is a shoe of many one-cell runs or one with long streaks. The big road, on the other hand, makes it hard to tell which hand number produced what. That is why people look at both.

What roadmaps do not tell you

A roadmap is a record of past results. It is not a picture of what comes next. A long streak is not about to break, and a run of ping-pong is not bound to continue. You read roadmaps not to predict, but to know exactly what kind of shoe is in front of you.

Summary

Bead plate   in order, six per column · shows hand count and tie positions
Big road     same side goes down, a change starts a new column · shows streaks
Tail         a big road column bending sideways after six cells
Tie          one cell on the bead plate, a green slash on the big road

Hiddenpick is a Windows program that runs Evolution live baccarat on Stake for you, following the rules you set. Words like runs and ping-pong are collected in baccarat glossary 2.