How to Read Baccarat Roads: The Complete Guide

Walk up to any baccarat table, in Macau or Las Vegas or an online live studio, and you will find a screen covered in colored circles, slashes and grids. Those are the roads: five scoreboards that record what the shoe has done so far. Most players can read the first two. Almost nobody can explain what the last three are actually measuring.

This guide fixes that. By the end you will be able to look at a live board and say exactly what every mark on it means, and why it is there. We will use a single 40-hand shoe throughout, and every diagram below is generated by the same road engine that powers our free Road Decoder — so what you see here is exactly what a real board would show.

The five roads at a glance

Two roads record results. Three roads describe the shape of the first two. That distinction is the whole game:

The last three are called the derived roads, because they are not recorded from the table — they are calculated from the Big Road. Nothing new enters the board through them. They are a second opinion on data you already have.

The shoe we will read

Here are our 40 hands, in dealt order. B is a Banker win, P a Player win, T a tie:

BBPPPBPBBBBBBBPPBPTPBBPPPBPPBBPBBBPPBPBB

That is the entire input. Every one of the five boards below is built from this string and nothing else.

Road 1: the Bead Plate

The Bead Plate is the simplest board on the table and the one to learn first. One hand, one bead. It fills the grid top to bottom, then starts a new column to the right. The common explanation is that this follows the same order you would read a Chinese newspaper column.

• Red bead — Banker won the hand.
• Blue bead — Player won the hand.
• Green bead — the hand was a tie.

The Bead Plate is a receipt. It answers one question — what happened, in what order — and it never distorts anything to make a pattern look cleaner. That honesty is also its limitation: streaks are hard to see because a run of six Bankers simply fills a column and starts another, and so does an alternating run.

For a side-by-side of how differently these two boards draw the same shoe, see Bead Plate vs Big Road.

Road 2: the Big Road

The Big Road takes the same hands and rearranges them so that streaks become visible. It is the board most players actually watch, and it is the one all three derived roads are calculated from. Three rules build it:

1. Same winner as the last hand? Move down one row in the current column — unless that cell is already taken or you are on the bottom row, in which case the streak turns right instead. More on that below.
2. Different winner? Start a new column to the right, at Row 1.
3. Tie? Do not move at all. Draw a green slash through the mark that is already there.

Rule 3 is the one that surprises people. A tie is not a result on the Big Road; it is an annotation on the previous result. This is deliberate — the Big Road exists to show streaks of Banker and Player, and a tie interrupts neither.

When a streak runs out of room: the dragon tail

The grid is six rows deep. So what happens on the seventh consecutive win? The column cannot go down any further, so it turns right and continues sideways along the bottom row. That sideways run is the dragon tail, and it is one of the most recognisable shapes on a casino board.

Our shoe has one. The fifth column is a seven-hand Banker streak: six marks straight down, and the seventh bends right along Row 6. The next Player win then starts its own column and drapes over the top of that tail:

There is a second reason a streak turns right, and it catches people out: the cell below is already occupied. Once a dragon tail has run along the bottom, later columns cannot pass through it, so a streak arriving from above bends early — sometimes several rows short of the bottom.

Take eight Bankers followed by six Players. The Bankers fill the first column and lay a tail along Row 6. The Player streak then comes down the second column and stops at Row 5, because Row 6 is taken:

So the full rule is: a streak moves down until it hits the bottom row or a cell that is already filled, and then it turns right.

The bend has its own guide if you want it in isolation: Dragon Tail in Baccarat. For the Big Road’s full rule set, see How to Read the Big Road.

Why three more roads exist

The Big Road tells you what the shoe did. The derived roads try to answer a different question: has the shoe been behaving consistently?

Think of it as a repetitiveness meter. If the Big Road keeps producing similar-looking columns, the derived roads fill with red. If it keeps breaking its own shape, they fill with blue. That is all they measure.

This one catches enough people that it has its own article, with the counts to prove it: Red vs Blue on Derived Roads.

The one rule all three derived roads share

Here is the part that is usually taught as three separate sets of rules. It is not. All three derived roads run the identical procedure. The only difference between them is how far back they look:

• Big Eye Boy looks back 1 column.
• Small Road looks back 2 columns.
• Cockroach Pig looks back 3 columns.

Every time a new mark lands on the Big Road, the road asks one of two questions, depending on where that mark landed.

Question A — the Big Road started a new column

Compare the depth of the column that just finished with the depth of the column lookback further back.

• Same depth → red.
• Different depth → blue.

Question B — the Big Road moved down a column

Look at the reference column lookback to the left, at the row you just landed on and the row above it.

• Both cells filled, or both cells empty → red. The reference column gave the same answer twice.
• One filled and one empty → blue. The reference column changed its answer.

Road 3: Big Eye Boy

Big Eye Boy (大眼仔路) has a lookback of 1, which means it starts the earliest. It gets going as soon as the Big Road reaches Column 2, Row 2, or Column 3, Row 1 if Column 2 never gets a second entry. It is drawn as hollow circles.

Let us verify the first few entries by hand.

Our Big Road columns, in order, have depths: Column 1 is Banker with 2, Column 2 is Player with 3, Column 3 is Banker with 1, Column 4 is Player with 1, Column 5 is Banker with 7.

• Entry 1 lands as the Big Road goes down to Column 2, Row 2 — so that is Question B. The reference column is one back, Column 1, which is 2 deep. Row 2 and Row 1 of Column 1 are both filled, so the answer came back the same twice → red.
• Entry 2, Column 2 Row 3, Question B again. Column 1 is only 2 deep, so Row 3 is empty while Row 2 is filled — the answer changed → blue.
• Entry 3 is a new column, Column 3 Row 1, so Question A. Compare the column that just finished, Column 2 with a depth of 3, against one column further back, Column 1 with a depth of 2. Different → blue.
• Entry 5, at Column 5 Row 1, is the interesting one. Column 4 has a depth of 1 and Column 3 has a depth of 1. Equal → red. The shoe repeated itself, and Big Eye Boy says so.

Check those against the diagram above and you will find red, blue, blue, blue, red. That is the whole road: the same two questions, over and over, 36 times.

Every mark of a full shoe traced one at a time: Big Eye Boy Explained.

Road 4: the Small Road

The Small Road (小路) is Big Eye Boy with the lookback moved from 1 to 2. It skips the column immediately to the left and compares against the one before it. Because it needs more history, it starts one column later — Column 3, Row 2, or Column 4, Row 1. It is drawn as filled circles.

Its fourth entry shows the case beginners find strangest. The Big Road is going down Column 5 to Row 3. The reference column is two back, Column 3, which only ever had one mark — so both Row 3 and Row 2 there are empty. Same answer twice, so the mark is red. Emptiness counts as consistency. The road is asking whether the answer changed, not whether anything is there.

The Small Road in full, including why two blank cells count as a red mark: How to Read the Small Road.

Road 5: Cockroach Pig

Cockroach Pig (曱甴路) completes the set with a lookback of 3, starting at Column 4, Row 2 or Column 5, Row 1. It is drawn as diagonal slashes rather than circles, which is the fastest way to tell it apart on a crowded board.

The name is usually translated as cockroach road, and the most common explanation is that the dense little slashes look like insect legs scurrying across the screen. It has no special significance beyond being the third road.

The third road on its own: Cockroach Pig Road Explained.

Reading all five together

On a real table these sit in one layout: the Bead Plate and Big Road at full size, the three derived roads underneath at about two-thirds scale. Here are all five for our shoe, stacked so none of them is cut off:

Players commonly describe the three derived roads as agreeing when all three show the same color, and diverging when they disagree. That is a fair description of what you are looking at — three different lookback distances producing the same or different answers. It is worth being precise about what that agreement actually is: three measurements of the same finished history, not three votes about the next hand.

What the roads cannot do

You now know how to read every mark on a baccarat board. The honest follow-up matters just as much.

The derived roads are computed from the Big Road. They contain no information the Big Road did not already have — they reorganise it. A road that fills with red is telling you the shoe has repeated itself so far, which is a statement about the past tense, and the cards have no memory of it.

So why learn any of this? Because the boards are the shared language of the game. Reading them lets you follow what is happening at the table, understand what other players are reacting to, and recognise when someone is selling a system built on a misreading. Scoreboard literacy is worth having on its own terms — as long as nobody sells it to you as an edge.

Where those house-edge numbers come from, and what they do not entitle you to conclude: Banker vs Player: House Edge and Odds Explained.

Where to practise

Reading about roads and building one are different skills, and the second is the one that sticks. The fastest way to learn is to enter results and watch all five boards update at once, so you can see which mark changed and ask yourself why before you are told.

Our Road Decoder does exactly that, free and without an account. Type in the shoe from this article and step through it. When the derived roads stop surprising you, you can read a live board.