Baccarat Scoreboards Explained
Baccarat scorecards with names like Bead Road, Big Eye Boy, and Cockroach Pig track the results of previous hands and use formulas to determine if the game is chaotic or reliable. In an easy game of predicting the winning hand, some people turn to the scoreboard to find trends and guess the future.
Even though the past hands don’t change the odds of the next hand, superstitious players have kept their own charts for decades. These days, most online casinos automatically keep the baccarat scoreboard and results of the current shoe for you. However, knowing how to read each scorecard is a skill in itself.
In this detailed guide, we’ll explain each baccarat scorecard, how they get built out over time, and what the information on them means.
Baccarat Scorecards
Table of Contents
The Baccarat Scoreboards
The game of baccarat has five scoreboards: Bead Road, Big Road, Big Eye Boy, Small Road, and Cockroach Pig.
In addition, there is usually a scorecard that shows the summarized results of the current baccarat shoe. You’ll see general data for the number of wins for Player or Banker, ties, pairs, and naturals.
The information they show ranges from the basic scoring of each hand’s outcome to comparing recent results to several hands back and patterns they may have. Sometimes, a “Predictor” also aims to guess the next mark in each chart.
What Each Baccarat Chart Shows
Baccarat scoreboards start as empty grids of squares in rows and columns. As gameplay progresses, each chart gets marks according to the most recent hand and the formula it is set to follow.
The basic charts in baccarat simply provide the results of previous rounds. The more complex scorecards have formulas that establish trends according to results from deeper and deeper in the past.
Let’s look at each one closely and see what they mean.
Bead Road
The Bead Road or Bead Plate is the most basic and noticeable scoreboard on display. It gives an exact representation of game history.
It is on a grid of six rows and a dozen or so columns. Some games’ Bead Road scorecards also have the winning hand’s score in the circle.
For each round or hand, you fill a square cell with a colored circle – red for Banker win, blue for Player, green tie.
There are usually some minor features in each grid square that are another indicator for a pair or a natural (9 or 8 on the first two cards).
Big Road
The Big Road is a wider chart that is a version of the Bead Road. But it is designed to convey strings of wins for Player or Banker, denoted by open red circles for Banker and blue circles for Player.
You move down a column for consecutive wins and start a new column when the win changes hands from blue to red or vice versa.
Derived Roads
The Big Eye Boy, Small Road, and Cockroach Pig scorecards track trends of previous hands according to information from Big Road. Each of these derived roads detects patterns from deeper in the past and indicates chaos or predictability.
Big Eye Boy has small red or blue rings in a grid of cells, Small Road uses solid circles, and Cockroach Pig uses slashes. Some players read trends from these scorecards when trying to guess the outcome of the next round.
Does the Baccarat Scoreboard Indicate Future Winners?
Baccarat involves random deals of playing cards from a shoe, so there is no guarantee that any scorecard analysis can predict the subsequent outcome, not even the predictor. Nevertheless, some people use scoreboards to find trends.
The current “chaos” or “predictability” of the game has nothing to do with the odds of the next hand. These charts are mainly for gut feelings, superstitions, or strategies that fall into the gambler’s fallacy.
How to Read the Baccarat Scorecards
First, when reading the baccarat scoreboards, they all start from the top left cell and read top to bottom and left to right. Remember that red and blue indicate the winner of a hand on only the Bead Road. On the derived roads, red represents predictability, and blue shows chaos.
Once you know how they work and how each of the baccarat scoreboards gets its next mark, you’ll be able to start spotting the trends.
General Statistics Board
Among baccarat’s hand-history scorecards, you will usually see a less cryptic numerical counter of results of all previous hands.
It is a simple total for each category in the shoe so far. You’ll see a category for each hand and their pairs, ties, and natural wins.
Reading The Bead Road
The Bead Road is an exact representation of game history. The order of results starts at the top left and moves down a column to the bottom and then to the top of the next column.
A red circle denotes a Banker win, blue for a Player win, and green is a tie. You will often see these markers with numbers of the winning hand score. For instance, a red circle that contains a 3 indicates a Banker’s win with a score of 3.
Most baccarat scoreboards have small red or blue circles in the top left or bottom right of a cell to indicate a banker or player pair for that hand. There may also be a cell notation for natural hands that won with just two cards. It is usually a slash or partly shaded cell.
Understanding The Big Road
The Big Road uses red and blue rings to mark changes in winning streaks between the Player and Banker, with green slashes to indicate when ties happen.
It is a six-row chart of cells that stretches into 20 or more columns. A new column begins each time the winning hand changes to the other side, and streaks get recorded by building down in the same column.
For instance, a red circle appears in the top left cell if the first round is a Banker win. If the following result is a Banker win, another red goes in the cell below, but if it is a Player win, start a new column with a blue circle at the top. You will see a green slash through the most recent mark for a tie but no new red or blue spaces.
Dragon Tails
As you build Big Road, you will run into streaks of wins for either side. The longer the run, the deeper the column of circles. When a streak runs longer than six hands, the seventh win and beyond get added to the right along the bottom row.
These long runs form something that looks like a tail. Some players like to identify and bet these streaks or “follow the dragon.”
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This game from one of our favorite baccarat casinos, SlotsLV, only has the Bead Road and Big Road, making it easier to grasp how those two get recorded. Can you predict the next mark and where it will be? Give it a try.
Derived Road Predictor
Some tables have a predictor that uses the current baccarat shoe results recorded up to that point to predict the next mark in each derived road. As the Big Road fills in, the predictor begins guessing according to its formulas.
A Banker column and a Player column each list predictions of hollow rings for Big Eye Boy, solid circles for Small Road, and colored slashes for Cockroach Pig. From this, players can look at the derived roads and the predictor to help determine the outcome of the next round based on their current strategy.
Reading The Derived Roads in Baccarat
The Derived Roads have that name because the information they convey gets derived from the Big Road. These three charts are similar, but each uses outcomes from further in the past than the previous one.
It’s from this tracking that players try to detect trends. Here is where blue indicates chaos, and red is predictability.
Note: You may have to manually keep track of these scorecards since the derived roads aren’t always available in land-based or online casino games. Use our printable baccarat scoreboard or grid paper to keep track as you play.
Big Eye Boy
The Big Eye Boy is the first derived road to start getting marks. It needs the fewest previous hands to start getting built out, beginning after only the third column of the Big Road begins.
The rings in the Big Eye Boy are smaller, usually two wide in a cell. Each mark only starts a new column when the colors change.
How Marks on This Board Get Created
Being the first derived baccarat scoreboard, the Big Eye Boy goes back the least distance into the past to determine trends based on a couple of rules:
- From the new Big Road column, check to see if the 1st column to the left and the 2nd column to the left are the same depth. If yes, you denote red on the Big Eye Boy. If no, blue.
- If the hand result is in the same column, check the 1st space to the left and one space above. If they are the same color, mark red. If they are different colors or blank, denote blue.
Small Road
As the second of the derived baccarat scorecards, the Small Road tracks results from further in the past than the Big Eye Boy. It scans back two columns instead of just one.
The marks here are usually around the same size as Big Eye Boy, but they are solid, filled in circles. Again, as colors change here, new columns begin.
How Marks on This Board Get Created
The small road looks back further on the Big Road than the Big Eye Boy. There are two rules for determining the next mark here:
- If starting a new Big Road column, check to see if the 1st column to the left and the 3rd column to the left are the same depth. If yes, mark red; if no, blue.
- If you are deeper in the same column, check the 2nd space to the left and one space above. If they are the same, mark red. If not, blue.
Cockroach Pig
For Cockroach Pig, you go one step even further into the past than the Small Road. You check not one, not two, but three columns or spaces back.
The marks here are colored slashes rather than circles, two wide in the same cell. Similarly to the other charts, a new column begins when the color of the mark changes.
How Marks on This Board Get Created
The Cockroach Pig is the baccarat scoreboard that looks back the furthest on the Big Road. To figure out the next mark, you need to check two things:
- If starting a new column in Big Road, check if the 1st column to the left and the 4th column to the left are the same depth. If yes, use a red slash. If no, blue.
- If you are in the same column, check if the 3rd space to the left and the space above are the same color. If yes, mark red. If no, blue.
Baccarat Charts Are Like Reading Tea Leaves (Sort of)
These extensive baccarat scorecards are similar to the roulette history board or the past results of a high-low dice game. To the player, they show a chain of events, for whatever that’s worth to them. To the casino, however, they help draw in more action from players who think the odds or chances continue to mature based on previous happenings.
Baccarat scoreboards are kind of like reading tea leaves – you must believe in these determiners and commit yourself to follow them. Otherwise, you have a simple game with a random outcome and no guarantees when you boil it all down. That is what baccarat is, after all.
Many people believe in fate, which draws them to this simple casino game they can’t control beyond a guess. Still, some players take a philosophical approach to gambling and like comparing the past and present to determine the future. Which type of player are you? Now that you know how to read the scoreboards, will any of that change?
Baccarat Scoreboard FAQ
Below are some answers to common questions we get regarding the baccarat scorecards.
How do you read the baccarat scoreboard?
Each baccarat scorecard starts in the top left. Then it gets read top to bottom and left to right. Since all of the charts get tracked slightly differently, we suggest using the detailed guide above for an in-depth explanation of each one.
Why do people keep track of baccarat hands?
People keep track of baccarat with the notion that a string of correlated past events means a future event is more or less likely to happen. This way of thinking is called the gambler’s fallacy and applies to several things in life. Despite superstition and perceived intuition, the fact is that any trends you find in the past hands do not affect the outcome of the next round.
Are there patterns in baccarat?
Despite what the derived roads show, it has been proven that there are no mathematical patterns in baccarat. The game is essentially equally random from one hand to the next.
