Macau's New Baccarat Side Bets, Costed: What Pairs+, Monkey no Monkey and 4/5/6 Cards Take From Every Bet

Three new baccarat side bets reached Macau's tables this year, approved by the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau in March and, by the May Day holiday, on the floors of all six concessionaires. Nobody has published what they cost. We enumerated every hand from an eight-deck shoe against the pay tables as reported, and the answer runs from 6.3% on the most generous reading of Pairs+ to 17.1% on the strictest, with Monkey no Monkey at 16.5% and the six 4/5/6 Cards wagers between 13.7% and 16.0%.

Three Bets, One Spring

The bets arrived with the smart tables. Macau's casinos spent 2025 and 2026 fitting mass-market baccarat with chip-reading tables that settle side bets automatically, and in March 2026 the DICJ updated its guidelines to permit three new wagers: Pairs+, Monkey no Monkey and a family called 4/5/6 Cards. Sands China was first, with the bets on its Cotai floors and at Sands Macao by April 23 under signage reading "Pioneered by Sands," and side-bet minimums from HKD100 on main floors where the main bets start at HKD500. Wynn and SJM followed within days. By the May 1 holiday a Citigroup survey of the floors found the bets at every concessionaire, with Galaxy offering Monkey no Monkey only and MGM adding the 4/5/6 wagers as well.

None of that tells a player what the bets cost. The DICJ approved them by guideline rather than by a published rule, its game-rules page lists nothing from 2026, and no operator we could find has put the pay tables on its website. What exists in writing is GGRAsia's report of the rules on March 30. We have taken those rules as stated, said so at each step, and done the arithmetic.

How Each Bet Works

Pairs+ replaces the familiar Player Pair and Banker Pair, which pay 11 to 1 on one hand. It wins if either hand's first two cards are a pair. One pair pays 3 to 1. Two pairs, one in each hand, pay 30 to 1 if their point scores differ and 300 to 1 if they are identical. The 300 to 1 line hides the one real ambiguity in the reported rules. In baccarat a ten, a jack, a queen and a king all score zero, so a pair of tens in one hand and a pair of kings in the other have identical point scores but different ranks. The table below prices the bet both ways.

Monkey no Monkey looks at the first four cards only, before any third card. If all four are face cards, the jacks, queens and kings that Asian players call monkeys, it pays 50 to 1. If all four are number cards, ace through ten, it pays 1 to 1. Any mix loses. The second line is what makes the bet unusual: it wins on more than a third of all hands, which is why the headline payout can be so large without the edge being larger still.

4/5/6 Cards is not one bet but six. Each wager names a side and a number of cards dealt in the round: Banker wins with four cards pays 4 to 1, with five cards 4.5 to 1, with six cards 5.5 to 1; Player wins with four cards pays 4 to 1, with five 6 to 1, with six 4.5 to 1. A wager loses if the other side wins, if the hand ties, or if the right side wins with the wrong number of cards. (Read as a single combined bet, the same pay table would hand the player a 155% advantage, which no casino offers; the six-wager reading is the only one that makes sense of the numbers.)

Macau's 2026 side bets, cheapest first. Payouts as reported by GGRAsia; everything else computed by us for an eight-deck shoe under the standard drawing rules. On a phone the table scrolls sideways.

What the Math Shows

Pairs+ turns on a single word. Either hand opens with a pair on 14.38% of deals, the same figure as the Either Pair bet, and 96% of those are a pair in one hand only, paid 3 to 1. Both hands pair on about one deal in 180; most of those pairs have different scores and pay 30 to 1. The 300 to 1 result is the rare one. If any two pairs of equal point score qualify, it comes up about once in 1,280 hands and the bet costs 6.34%, cheaper than the ordinary Pair bet it replaces. If the two pairs must share a rank, the top prize comes up once in 2,630 hands, the value-0 pairs of mixed rank drop to the 30 to 1 line, and the bet costs 17.14%, the dearest on the layout. Until an operator publishes its rule card, a player cannot know which bet is being offered, and the difference is almost eleven percentage points.

Monkey no Monkey is built to feel frequent. Four number cards in a row happen 34.9% of the time, so the bet pays something on roughly one hand in three, and most sessions will never see the 50 to 1 result, which needs four face cards from the first four and arrives about once in 370 hands. The even-money line is what the player is really buying, and the 16.50% edge is the price. That is a little more than the Tie bet's 14.36%, and about the same as the common Lucky 6 table that pays 12 to 1 on a two-card 6 and 20 to 1 on three cards, which costs 16.68%.

The 4/5/6 Cards family is six prices on the same idea, and a curious symmetry sits in the middle of it. Banker and Player each win a four-card hand, meaning no third card for either side, exactly 17.16% of the time, so the two four-card wagers are identical bets at identical prices, 14.22%. The drawing rules break the symmetry from there: Banker wins more often with five cards (15.68% against 11.99%), Player more often with six (15.48% against 13.02%). The casino's pay table leans the other way on one line, paying 6 to 1 on the rarest result, Player with five cards, which still leaves that wager the most expensive of the six at 16.05%. The best buy in the family, Banker with five cards at 4.5 to 1, costs 13.74%.

Set the whole page against the main bets and the pattern Macau's floors have followed for a decade holds. Banker with commission costs 1.06% and Player 1.24%. Every one of the new wagers, on any reading, costs between five and sixteen times as much.

How We Computed It

We enumerated every possible deal from an eight-deck shoe, keeping the rank of each of the first four cards and the number of cards dealt, under the standard drawing rules, and weighted every outcome by its exact probability. The same run reproduces the figures on our Odds & Payouts page to four decimal places (Banker 45.8597%, Player 44.6247%, Tie 9.5156%), and its four Pairs+ classes add up to the 14.3817% Either Pair probability in our Baccarat Probability Calculator. No operator states a deck count; eight is Macau's standard shoe. With six decks the pair-based figures move most, because a pair is likelier the more copies of each rank the shoe holds: Pairs+ rises to 8.00% or 18.62% and Monkey no Monkey to 16.83%, while the six card-count wagers move by less than 0.05 percentage points.