Dragon Tiger: one card each, half back on a tie

Dragon Tiger is baccarat cut down to a single card per side. The dealer puts one card on the Dragon spot and one on the Tiger spot, and the higher card wins. Nobody draws a third card, no points are added up, and the round is settled the moment the second card is face up. The one rule that matters for your money is what a tie does to a main bet, and it is covered in its own section below.

A round, step by step

1. You bet. The main choice is one of the two sides, both paid at even money. Next to them sit the tie bet and the suited tie bet.
2. The dealer turns one card for the Dragon. It comes from an eight-deck shoe.
3. The dealer turns one card for the Tiger.
4. Ranks are compared, suits are ignored. In Evolution's rules the ace counts as 1 and is the lowest card; the king is the highest. So a 2 beats an ace, and a king beats a queen.
5. Settlement. The higher card wins even money. Equal ranks are a tie, and the main bets are settled by the tie rule.

That is the whole dragon tiger game. There is no third-card rule to learn and no commission to pay on a winning side.

What a tie does to the main bets

In Evolution's Live Dragon Tiger, a tie returns half of each main bet. The other half is lost. Put $20 on the Tiger, see two sevens, and $10 comes back.

A suited tie is a tie where the two cards also share a suit, for example two sixes of hearts. It is possible because the shoe holds eight decks. For the main bets it changes nothing: half comes back, half is lost.

The side bets settle on their own:

• Tie: pays 11:1 when the ranks match, whatever the suits.
• Suited tie: pays 50:1 when rank and suit both match.

Other studios may print a different tie payout or a different tie rule. The table's info screen is the only place to confirm what applies at the table in front of you, and the numbers below assume Evolution's version.

The maths of every bet

The shoe holds 416 cards. Once the Dragon card is out, 415 remain, and 31 of them share its rank (the other cards of that rank in eight decks). Seven of those 31 also share its suit. Everything else follows from that.

These are our calculations from the published rules. The 96.27% figure for the main bets is the same one Pragmatic Play lists on its own game page for Dragon Tiger.

Look at where the 3.73% comes from. The two sides win equally often, so on non-tie rounds the casino gains nothing. Its entire edge is the half stake it keeps on a tie: 7.47% ÷ 2 ≈ 3.73%. If a table paid the tie at 8:1 instead of 11:1, the tie bet's edge would jump to 32.77%, which is why the payout printed on the info screen is worth a look before you sit down.

Cost per hour

A per-hand edge only means something once it is multiplied by the number of hands. The round counts below are our assumptions, not studio figures: about 70 hands an hour at a standard live baccarat table, about 100 rounds at a standard Dragon Tiger table, and about 150 at a speed version.

Formula: stake × rounds an hour × edge. To make an hour of the main bet cost what a $10 banker hour costs, the stake has to drop to about $2 ($7.42 ÷ (100 × 3.73%)). That is the honest price of the faster, simpler game. The banker or player page explains why banker is the cheapest seat in baccarat.

Why rounds go so fast

• Two cards, not four to six. Baccarat deals at least two cards a side and sometimes a third. Here each side gets one.
• No drawing decision. There is no tableau to apply, so the dealer never pauses to check whether a hand draws.
• No commission to settle. A winning banker bet in classic baccarat has 5% taken off; Dragon Tiger pays even money straight.
• A speed version on top. Evolution's Super Speed Dragon Tiger keeps the rules and shortens the betting time, with quicker dealing. The same idea as speed baccarat, applied to a game that was already short.

Evolution also runs First Person Dragon Tiger, an RNG version in a virtual studio rather than a dealt shoe, where the pace depends on how quickly you click.

Dragon Tiger or baccarat: side by side

The table shows the trade. Baccarat makes you wait for drawing rules and charges commission, but it hands the main bets back untouched on a tie. Dragon Tiger drops all of that and charges you on ties instead, at a rate that works out more than three times higher per hand. For the rest of the family of variants, see our baccarat games overview.

Mistakes we see at Dragon Tiger tables

1. Chasing the tie. A tie arrives on average once every 13.4 rounds (415 ÷ 31). Thirty rounds without one happen about 9.7% of the time, roughly one stretch in ten, so a long gap is not a signal. Flat $5 on the tie for 100 rounds is $500 staked and about $51.80 lost in expectation. Raising the stake after each miss only makes the hour more expensive. The tie bet page covers the same trap at the baccarat table.
2. Covering both sides. $10 on each side can never win. On a normal round one pays and one loses; on a tie you lose half of both. Expected cost: about $0.75 a round, or $74.70 an hour at 100 rounds.
3. Reading the roads as a forecast. The studio shows statistics and baccarat-style roads. They are a record of the shoe so far. Our big road guide explains how to read one without treating it as a prediction.
4. Keeping the baccarat stake. The same $25 that costs $18.55 an hour on banker at a standard baccarat table costs $93.25 an hour on the dragon tiger main bet at our assumed 100 rounds.
5. Assuming every table pays 11:1. If the info screen shows a different tie payout or tie rule, the numbers on this page no longer apply.

If you want a plan for stakes and session length, the logic in our baccarat strategy guide carries over: fix the budget, then size the stake from rounds and edge.

Where to play

The score counts what each casino publishes about its licence, ID checks and withdrawal limits, not how its baccarat lobby looks.

Ranked on our overall score. We do not list which of these casinos runs a Dragon Tiger table, so open the live lobby and check the studio and tie payout before you deposit.

Questions and answers