July 21, 2026 · 9 min read · baccarat · blackjack · casino economics

The game with no decisions out-earns blackjack

Baccarat asks nothing of you. You bet on Banker or Player, the cards are dealt face up according to a drawing table that has not changed in decades, and the outcome arrives without your participation. There is no hitting, no standing, no doubling, no strategy chart. Whatever skill means in a casino, baccarat is its absence.

Blackjack is the opposite. Every hand is a decision, the decisions have measurable costs, and the composition of the remaining shoe genuinely shifts the odds. It is the game the books were written about. It is also, on the Las Vegas Strip, no longer the game that makes the most money — and it has not been for sixteen years.

The 2025 scoreboard

The Nevada Gaming Control Board publishes monthly revenue reports that break out win by game and by geography, and its twelve-month summary for the Las Vegas Strip area covering calendar 2025 is unambiguous. Baccarat won $1.4096 billion on an average of 392 tables. Blackjack, which the Board still lists under its old name Twenty One, won $897.0 million on an average of 1,034 tables. The lower line has more than two and a half times the felt.

Divide win by units and the gap becomes structural rather than incidental. The average Strip baccarat table produced about $3.60 million in 2025. The average Strip blackjack table produced about $868,000. That is roughly 4.1 times as much revenue from a piece of furniture that is, in floor-space terms, no larger. Fewer properties even offer it: 24 Strip licensees reported baccarat units during the year, against 34 reporting blackjack.

The share arithmetic needs its denominator stated carefully, because the Board's totals are wider than they look. Against the full 'Table, Counter and Card Games' category — which also folds in the sports book, the race book and the poker rooms — baccarat took 36.5% of Strip win from 15.0% of the units, while blackjack took 23.2% from 39.5%. Narrow it to live table games only and baccarat took 42.2% of the win from 17.7% of the tables, with blackjack at 26.9% from 46.7%. Either way the shape is the same, and the per-table figures do not move at all.

Baccarat, Strip, 2025: 24 locations, 392 average units, $1,409,598,000 won.
Blackjack (Twenty One), Strip, 2025: 34 locations, 1,034 average units, $897,035,000 won.
Mini-baccarat, Strip, 2025: 18 locations, 49 average units, $49,966,000 won.
Win per table: about $3.60 million for baccarat against about $868,000 for blackjack.

The year the ranking flipped

This is not a recent inversion. On the Strip, baccarat first out-earned blackjack in calendar 2009, when it won $970.2 million against blackjack's $723.9 million. The year before, blackjack was still comfortably ahead, $908.4 million to $766.7 million. The change came from both directions at once: Strip blackjack win fell more than 20% in 2009 while baccarat rose more than 26%, in the middle of a recession that hit domestic mid-market play far harder than it hit international high-limit play.

Two labels matter here and are easy to lose. The first is geography. On the Strip the crossover is 2009, but statewide it is 2010 — UNLV's Center for Gaming Research puts it plainly, noting that baccarat has been out-earning blackjack since 2010, and the extra year is simply the rest of Nevada's blackjack revenue holding the statewide total up a little longer. The second is definition. These are the Board's standalone Baccarat line. Mini-baccarat is reported separately and is a much smaller and shrinking business on the Strip: 49 tables and $50.0 million in 2025.

The concentration is the part worth sitting with. When baccarat first crossed $1.2 billion statewide in 2010, the Las Vegas Sun reported that more than 99 percent of it came from the Strip. Check that against the Board's own reports and it holds — statewide baccarat win that year was $1.188 billion and the Strip alone accounted for $1.182 billion. Baccarat in Nevada is, to a first approximation, a few dozen buildings on one boulevard.

The table swap

Casinos allocate floor space the way any business allocates shelf space, and the twenty-year record of what they chose is public. In 2005 the Strip averaged 1,487 blackjack tables and 110 baccarat tables. In 2025 it averaged 1,034 blackjack tables and 392 baccarat tables. Blackjack lost roughly a third of its footprint; baccarat more than tripled its own. One nuance keeps that from being a clean swap: Strip mini-baccarat went the other way over the same span, from 110 tables and $200.2 million in win down to 49 tables and $50.0 million, so the baccarat family's unit growth is less dramatic than the headline line alone implies.

Zoom out further and the trend is older than the crossover. UNLV's Center for Gaming Research tracked Nevada's statewide table mix from 1985 to 2023 and found that 81% of casino games were blackjack in 1985 against 52% in 2023, and that the game fell from more than half of all table win to 31% of it. That series is statewide rather than Strip, and it stops in 2023, so it does not sit alongside the 2025 Strip numbers as a current reading — but it establishes that blackjack's relative decline is a four-decade drift, not a post-2008 accident.

None of this means blackjack is struggling in absolute terms. Nearly $900 million of annual win on one stretch of road is an enormous business, and blackjack still occupies more Strip tables than every other live game combined by a wide margin. What changed is that it stopped being the game the floor is organized around.

Strip blackjack tables: 1,487 average in 2005, 1,034 average in 2025.
Strip baccarat tables: 110 average in 2005, 392 average in 2025.
Strip mini-baccarat: 110 tables and $200.2 million won in 2005, 49 tables and $50.0 million in 2025.
Nevada statewide, per UNLV: blackjack was 81% of casino games in 1985 and 52% in 2023.

The edge is not the explanation, but it does not hurt

There is a tidy story people tell about this — that baccarat wins more despite charging less — and it is wrong. The Wizard of Odds prices the eight-deck baccarat banker bet at a 1.06% house edge, the player bet at 1.24% and the tie at 14.36%, figures that assume the standard 5% banker commission and an 8-to-1 tie payout. Blackjack under liberal Las Vegas rules, played with correct basic strategy, runs 0.28%. Baccarat charges roughly four times as much per dollar wagered as well-played blackjack does.

Keep the qualifier attached, because it is doing real work. That 0.28% is a best case: a specific, generous rule set played perfectly. A Strip table paying 6-to-5 on naturals instead of 3-to-2 adds about 1.39 percentage points to whatever the rest of its rules cost, which is enough to push that game past baccarat banker's 1.06% on its own. Blackjack's advertised cheapness is conditional on both the table and the player. Baccarat's 1.06% is unconditional — it is the same number for everyone at the table, forever, with no way to play it better or worse.

One more distinction, because it is the single easiest number on these reports to misread. The Board's 'Win Percent' column is a hold ratio, not a house edge; for games the Board describes it only as a ratio adjusted for the effects of credit play, and never publishes a formula. Strip baccarat's 2025 Win Percent was 16.27 against blackjack's 12.21. That is a statement about how much of the money brought to the table the house ended up with, not about the odds on any single bet.

A couple of hundred players

Blackjack's win is the sum of an enormous number of small bets. Baccarat's is not, and the state's own economists say so out loud. Michael Lawton, senior economic analyst at the Nevada Gaming Control Board, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in October 2024 that it 'isn't uncommon for baccarat players to make wagers of six figures per hand which adds to the volatility.' Asked how many such players there are, he framed it as an order of magnitude rather than a count: 'You might have a couple hundred and if one or two of those players were to lose a large amount or win a large amount, the swings can be drastic.'

Treat that 'couple hundred' as what it is — an analyst gesturing at scale in an interview, not a published census of high-limit players. But the volatility it describes shows up in the data unmistakably. In January 2025 the Strip's baccarat win rose 121% year over year to $214.3 million on volume of $801.3 million, with hold at 26.74% against 16.43% a year earlier. In the same month, total statewide gaming win excluding baccarat rose 3.7%. One game, held unusually well against a couple of hundred people, moved the entire month.

UNLV's researchers draw the same conclusion from the long series: 'The increased reliance on baccarat, a more volatile game, has led to greater variance in reported field results for both individual properties and the Strip as a whole.' A blackjack pit's monthly result is close to its expectation because the law of large numbers has thousands of hands to work with. A baccarat pit's result is a small number of very large samples, which is why Strip revenue headlines now swing on outcomes rather than on volume.

The billion dollars that flies in

If baccarat's revenue came from the same place blackjack's does, it would behave the way blackjack's does. It does not. Strip baccarat win fell 42.98% in 2020, from $1.0335 billion in 2019 to $589.3 million, with the table count dropping from 333 to 255. Strip blackjack fell 45.91% over the same period, from $826.5 million to $447.1 million. Both games collapsed, which is what a closed city does to everything.

The recovery is where they diverge. Strip baccarat rose 55.53% in 2021 to $916.6 million, 24.96% in 2022 to $1.1443 billion, and 29.86% in 2023 to $1.4656 billion — the third-highest Strip baccarat year on record, behind only 2013's $1.5899 billion and 2014's $1.4897 billion. The Nevada Independent reported that more than $8.8 billion was wagered on Strip baccarat in 2023, up 13.5%, and that casinos held 16.6% of it, the highest baccarat hold in twenty years. That 16.6% matches the Board's own twelve-month Win Percent for the Strip exactly.

The obvious reading is that international high-limit travel came back, and the monthly data is at least consistent with it: in September 2023 baccarat led Strip table income at $147.4 million, up 88% year over year, while blackjack produced $74.7 million, up 18%. Be honest about the limits of that inference, though. No primary source publishes the international share of Nevada baccarat win. The correlation between baccarat revenue and the return of long-haul travel is analyst reading, not a measured quantity, and it should be stated that way. What is measured, statewide and labelled as wagering volume rather than win, is that the most ever bet on baccarat in Nevada came in 2014 — about $12 billion, from which casinos won $1.5 billion — while blackjack's wagering peak was 2007, about $11.5 billion bet and $1.4 billion won.

Why the casino would rather you played the other one

Put the two columns side by side and the asymmetry is complete. Baccarat costs the player about four times as much per bet as well-played blackjack, it produces about 4.1 times as much revenue per table, and it demands nothing from the person placing the bet. Blackjack is cheaper per hand, harder to run profitably against skilled play, and requires a decision from you every fifteen seconds. From an operator's chair, the game with no decisions is simply a better product.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not imply for a player. Baccarat's shoe does technically drift as cards leave it, and people have written about counting it — but the edges that appear are tiny and rare, which is why our own baccarat page calls counting it real but worthless. There is no meaningful decision to sharpen and no memory in the game to exploit. The 1.06% is the whole story, and it is the same 1.06% on your first hand and your ten-thousandth.

Blackjack's numbers, by contrast, are not fixed. The difference between a 0.28% game and a 2% game is rules you can read before you sit down. The difference between paying that edge and playing near it is a strategy chart you can actually learn. And the difference between a shoe you are tracking and one you are not is the only genuine information asymmetry left on a casino floor. That is not a promise of profit — the swings described above cut in both directions, and they are larger than most people's bankrolls. It is just a description of where skill can and cannot be applied. On the Strip, the revenue reports say the house has been steadily moving its money toward the game where it cannot.

Baccarat gives you nothing to work with. Blackjack gives you a decision on every hand and a shoe that remembers what it dealt — start with the count and the basic strategy that make those decisions worth something.

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