How often does a tie come up in baccarat? About 6 times a shoe

2026-09-27

The tie is the result people tend to forget. If you bet on banker or player, a tie just hands your stake back, so it slips by. Still, ties come up more often than most expect, and betting on the tie itself is a different story. We counted with real shoes collected from Evolution live baccarat at the Stake (stake.com) casino.

9.3% of hands

Across 25,133 shoes recorded completely between September 9 and 24, 2026, 1,683,943 hands in all, the tie came up 9.3% of the time. That is about one hand in eleven. The theoretical value for 8-deck baccarat is 9.52%, so the data runs a little low, most likely because the tie in the first one or two hands of a shoe is sometimes merged with neighbouring hands in the collected records.

About 6 per shoe

How many ties each shoe had.

A shoe had 6.2 ties on average. The most common counts were 5 and 6, together 32% of shoes. Between 4 and 8 ties covers 70%.

The edges exist too. Shoes with one tie or none were 1.4%, and shoes with no tie at all were only 53 (0.2%). At the other end, about 9% of shoes had more than 10, and the most in one shoe was 18. Same odds, and still this much spread from shoe to shoe.

Betting on the tie

In Evolution baccarat a tie pays 8 times the stake. With the theoretical 9.52%, every 1 bet on the tie loses a little over 14% on average. That is more than ten times worse than banker (-0.8 to -1.2%) or player (-1.2 to -1.4%). Six ties a shoe does not mean betting it often will fill the gap.

When you bet banker or player

If you bet banker or player and a tie comes up, the stake comes back and the hand counts for nothing. In step-based bet tables like a martingale the step usually stays where it was. About 6 of a shoe's 67 hands pass this way, so a little over 60 hands actually decide a winner.

Summary

Per hand             9.3% (theory 9.52%)
Per shoe             6.2 on average, 4 to 8 in 70% of shoes
Shoes with no tie    0.2%
Shoes with 10+       about 9%, most 18
Bet 1 on tie         around -14% on average

Hiddenpick is a Windows program that runs Evolution live baccarat on Stake (stake.com) for you, following the rules you set. The banker and player split is covered in does the banker really win more.