Baccarat is a popular casino card game in which you wager on the outcome of two hand-dealt cards. The values of the cards are added up to determine the hand total, with the winning bet paid out according to whether it’s the Player bet (a bet on the player’s hand having a higher total than the banker’s), the Banker bet (a bet on the banker’s hand having a higher total than that of the player), or the tie bet (a bet that neither the Player nor Banker has won). The game originated in Italy and quickly gained popularity in France among the nobility and wealthy. It was then introduced into the US and has since become one of the world’s most popular games.
The current study sought to understand the motivations and processes underlying baccarat gamblers’ tendency to follow trends in the game, which is known as “bet with the trend” or simply the “trend bet.” The results of the experiment indicate that the majority of baccarat customers opted to place their bets in accordance with recent outcomes of the player and banker, regardless of streak length. This behavior is consistent with the illusory correlation (Chapman, 1967) hypothesis, in which people erroneously perceive meaningful and predictable patterns in sequences that are in fact random.
Another possible explanation for the phenomenon observed in this study is that the game’s temporal structure may promote trend-following. Unlike roulette, where the results of past spins are visible, baccarat is played on a table with a shuffled deck after each round. As a result, bettors may feel that past outcomes are already fixed in the past and thus should be less likely to be changed by future events. In support of this theory, Strickland et al. (2015) found that displaying past results during a coin toss experiment decreased the probability of grouping based on consecutive outcomes, and also strengthened negative recency, compared to arbitrary grouping.
While the results of this study demonstrate that positive recency is common in baccarat, it is important to note that other cognitive distortions, such as hot hand fallacy and illusory correlation, are also prevalent in the casino setting. Consequently, it is critical to explore the specific social and environmental factors that interact with individual differences in these biases. In the case of baccarat, these could include cultural influences or features unique to the game’s casino setting. Future research that explicitly addresses these interacting factors is therefore warranted.
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