Baccarat is a card game that has been popular in several casinos in Las Vegas for many years. This game started way back in the 15th century when people from Italy played it under the name of punto banco (approximately meaning ‘point zero’). The French later made their own version known as ‘chemin de fer’.
But Baccarat also has a mythology; according to which a blonde virgin was about to go through an Etruscan ritual wherein her fate was decided. Nine gods were waiting to see how a nine sided dice was rolled to reveal the virgin’s fate. It is said that with a dice rolling on 8 or 9, the virgin was facing a life of a priestess and in case the dice rolled 6 or 7 she was banned from any religious activity and also outcast by the church. As you can see, that fate of this virgin relied mainly on the chance that was determined by the roll of a dice.
This is why Baccarat is known today as a game of chance, because the fate of a gambler will depend only on the way the cards are revealed by the dealer. There is no strategy whatsoever involved in the game, because the outcome relies only on the way cards reveal to the player.
If you were to believe what the traditionalists of this game say, then you would believe that the original game was invented by Felix Falguirerein, who played the game with a deck of Tarot cards, the same ones that are used to predict the future of a person, hence the mythology related to this game. As such four suits of Tarot have translated into the four suits of cards that the game is used to play with these days.
Another interesting fact about Baccarat’s history is that it was initially played by nobility as an illegal game, but once France became aware of revenue that this game could bring, they started to make it legal and used the taxes collected in this way as funds to help poor regions of the country, developing them into more prosperous regions.
In the 50s an American version of Baccarat was invented by Tommy Renzoni who combined the French version with the European version of baccarat which resulted in a mini baccarat game that is seen being played today in many casinos across USA. With the emergence of the internet, baccarat was also introduced in many of the online casino websites where it has gained an increased popularity as so do all the other games that are found online.
