If you’re looking for a more realistic gambling experience there are plenty of live casino sites that offer games with real dealers ready and waiting to be broadcast directly to your home from a studio. These casinos look to fill a gap for those who want to play online, but want the social interaction with dealers and other players.
Best Live Casino Sites
Live Dealer Games
Frequently Asked Questions
In this next section we’ll answer some of the most common questions we receive about playing live dealer games online.
Q. Where Do The Games Come From?
A. Games are normally broadcast from studios, although there are a few casinos with land based connections that connect you to special tables actually within real world casinos.
Q. Do Casinos Share Games With Other Casinos?
A. Most casinos will use games from one or more specialist software providers as it’s not economical for all but the largest online casinos to run a full suite of independent games. Having said this, many casinos have dedicated tables set up purely for their players but these are normally still run through the same studios, they’re just exclusive to the casino to make sure there are always seats available for their players.
Q. Are the Games Fair or Can the Casinos Cheat?
A. Games are run by independent studios who are paid through license fees collected from the casinos, most likely based on turnover. It is therefore in best interests of the studio to offer a fair game. The games are also regularly audited for anomalies and follow the same strict rules that a land based casino would have – complete with pit bosses to oversee the action.
Q. Can I Play on a Mobile or Tablet?
A. Yes, in fact the games are often much better on a smartphone. The only downside is that they can drain your battery fairly quickly so if you’re planning on settling down for a long session you might want to have a charger or power bank to hand.
Q. Can You Always Get a Seat at a Game?
A. This is one of the downsides to playing with live dealers, there has to be enough empty seats to satisfy the players. For games like roulette where it doesn’t matter how many people are playing at the same time you’re generally not restricted and should easily be able to jump on a table at any time of the day.
For games like blackjack where decisions are needed from the player there will be a limited number of spots at a table, meaning that when they’re full you can’t sit down. If capacity allows additional tables will be opened, but you could find at busy times that there are no seats available.
Another characteristic that live casinos take from their land based cousins is raising the minimum bet when the tables start to get full. So at peak times you may be able to get a seat, but the limits could be a little higher than you’d find at 10am on a Tuesday.
Q. Can You Count Cards in a Live Casino?
A. In theory you would think that card counting at a live casino would be very similar to a land based casino, but in reality there are many protections put in place to stop this happening. First are the normal precautions, such as using eight decks and shuffling after half of the cards have been dealt. This is similar to what you’d see in a lot of land based casinos.
For budding online card counters though the bigger problem comes from the computers. Every card is scanned as it’s dealt which means that not only does the casino know the precise count at any one point, they can also compare player activity to that count. So if you’re increasing your bet as the count becomes more favourable, the casino will know exactly what you’re doing.
And whilst card counting isn’t illegal, the casino isn’t obligated to take your bets. So if your betting aligns a little too closely to the count you could well find yourself banned from the casino pretty quickly.