Live Dealer - Your Complete Guide

One of the more recent trends that we’ve witnessed over the last several years, is the influx of live experiences with gambling. Online casinos have been around for over 2 decades now, and players are wanting to go the extra mile to be able to emulate that real casino experience - whether it’s for the live interaction with dealers, or seeing a full shoe being used for blackjack.

What Are Live Dealers?

It’s considered a live casino when you’re playing a game with a croupier/dealer/host who is interacting with you and the game itself. For example, you can watch a croupier spin the roulette wheel, and release the ball into the ball-track, whilst replying to your live chat messages all in real time (give or take a few seconds because of technicalities).

One of the main draws of live gaming is to not rely on the computer/software based random number generator (RNG) type games, and to allow for “true RNG”. If a live casino roulette ball landed on black 8 times on the trot, studies show you’d be more inclined to think it’s realistic than if it was on a software version of the game.

How To Play

This varies per game, but typically you will have a variety of cameras covering different angles (mainly to emphasise production value of the show), and you’ll have sensors (optical character recognition or weight sensors) which detect which cards are drawn or which numbers are landed on. This is then relayed back to the player in close-to-real-time allowing for a digitised version of the game to be played back on your monitors at home. The experience has been tried and refined over a number of years now and is top quality for speed and reliability.

When it comes to the rules, they will be exactly the same as the digital version. Rules for all games live and digital should be exactly the same across the board.

What Live Games Can I Play?

You can play all the traditional casino classics, such as roulette, blackjack, baccarat and so on. But in more recent times, gaming software houses have been investing in live game shows, where you have a presenter guiding players through a game show. Examples are this are Monopoly or Dream Catcher, where a presenter spins a large vertically mounted game show wheel, with either a 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 or 40. Wherever the wheel stops, everyone who covered that number wins their stake multiplied. This would be quite fun on it’s own, but Dream Catcher adds a twist whereby you can also land on either a 2 or a 7x multiplier. This changes the potential winnings of the next spin (stakes are held for the extra free spin) - which means you could be spinning to win 280x your stake. Far greater than any traditional roulette wheel!

Speaking of traditional roulette wheels, Lightning Roulette has given roulette a major shakeup. With a show host and increased odds of up to 500x your stake (every spin!), it’s well worth dipping your toes into the water there.

Types of live casino games (more games available depending on your online casino provider):

• Live Roulette

• Live Blackjack

• Live Poker

• Live Baccarat

For example if you were to play blackjack with a live dealer you will see a similar screen to the picture below. The dealer will offer you the chance to bet first as you can see below:

Then once the cards are dealt the dealer will give you the relevant choices depending on your hand with on screen controls as you can see in the picture below:

The game will then play out and continue as normal. This is similar across all online casinos and the controls will be relevant and obvious to the game in question.

List of available live game shows (available at most online casinos):

• Dream Catcher

• Monopoly

• Deal or No Deal

• Lightning Roulette

Here is an example of the live games available, this one is called Dream Catcher and is fast becoming an online favourite!

What Are The Rules?

The rules vary from game to game here so be sure to read each one carefully before you have fun playing. Live games have taken off like a rocket in the last few years and when you can play as if you're in a casino but from the comfort of your own home it's not hard to see why!

As we said above all the live games will have exactly the same rules as their digital counterparts and the live game shows will have a detailed list of their respective rules in the relevant sections. Along with that the live chats are always incredibly helpful so don't hesitate to ask them for anything you need.