Jili9 Card Game House Edge: Why Every Bet Prices Differently

Card game house edge figures aren’t one number per game — they’re one number per bet, and the same table can carry three or four of them at once. Baccarat and Dragon Tiger between them carry six named bets, each priced by its own mechanism rather than by the game’s reputation as a whole. This page runs through all six with the arithmetic behind each one, including a worked calculation a reader can check by hand.

What Sets a Card Game House Edge, Bet by Bet

A card game’s house edge is a property of its paytable, not of the cards themselves. Two bets resolved from the identical deck can carry wildly different edges once the payout for winning changes between them.

Bet	Payout	House edge
Baccarat Banker	1:1 less 5% commission	1.06%
Baccarat Player	1:1	1.24%
Baccarat Tie	8:1	14.4%
Dragon Tiger Dragon	1:1	3.73%
Dragon Tiger Tiger	1:1	3.73%
Dragon Tiger Tie	11:1	32.8%

The six bets above show exactly how much that payout choice matters: same cards, same deal, edges a factor of thirty apart.

Baccarat Banker — 1.06% Edge

Banker wins fractionally more often than Player across a full shoe, and a standard 5% commission on Banker wins pulls that extra win rate back down. The result is the lowest edge of any bet covered here: about 1.06%, on a 1:1 payout minus commission.

Baccarat Player — 1.24% Edge

Player carries no commission at all, paying a clean 1:1, but it wins slightly less often than Banker over the same shoe. That marginally lower win rate is the entire reason Player’s 1.24% edge sits a little above Banker’s, despite paying the simpler, commission-free 1:1.

Baccarat Tie — 14.4% Edge on an 8:1 Payout

Tie only wins on a small share of hands, so its 8:1 payout has to be large to attract a stake at all. Working backward from the stated 14.4% edge at 8:1: solving 8p minus (1 minus p) equals negative 0.144 puts the implied tie probability at about 9.5%, which is exactly why so long a payout still leaves the house well ahead. That’s the arithmetic behind every figure on this page, laid out so it can be checked rather than taken on faith.

Dragon and Tiger — 3.73% Edge Each

Bet	Payout	Edge
Dragon	1:1, half stake back on a tie	3.73%
Tiger	1:1, half stake back on a tie	3.73%

Both the Dragon bet and the Tiger bet carry the identical 3.73% edge, since the game is a mirror image of itself around the two positions. That edge holds only because a tie returns half the stake rather than taking it outright; drop the half-back rule and both bets would carry a noticeably higher edge.

Dragon Tiger Tie — 32.8% Edge on an 11:1 Payout

A tie in Dragon Tiger lands rarely enough that even an 11:1 payout leaves the house with close to a third of every unit staked over the long run. At 32.8% it is the highest edge of any bet on this page — roughly 31 times the 1.06% on a Baccarat Banker bet resolved from the very same shoe. It is priced that way because it wins the least often of any of them.

Why a Bigger Tie Payout Isn’t Generosity

A worked illustration, using the Baccarat Tie bet at its standard probability:

Tie payout offered	House edge on the tie bet
8:1	14.4%
9:1	4.8%

Raise the payout from 8:1 to 9:1 without changing how often a tie actually lands, and the edge on that bet falls — not because winning became more likely, but because the win pays a little more when it happens. A table advertising the larger of two tie payouts hasn’t made the bet fairer on its own; it has changed one input in the same formula that produced every figure above. Reading the payout next to the probability, rather than the payout alone, is what actually tells a player whether a number is generous.

Checking a Table’s Own Paytable Before Betting

1. Find the payout printed for the specific bet under consideration, not just the game’s name.
2. Note whether a tie takes the whole stake or half of it, since that single rule shifts several of the figures above.
3. Compare the payout against how rarely that outcome actually lands, using the arithmetic method shown above for Baccarat Tie.

None of the six edges above changes because a table calls itself something else. Baccarat’s full third-card rules are where the win rates behind Banker and Player actually come from, and the card games casino overview covers the rest of the lobby these bets sit inside. RTP, covered on the glossary works on the same principle as house edge, just stated as the inverse number.