Live casinos are as close as one can get to an authentic casino experience from the comfort of their own homes.
Gambling on the internet has been a reality since 1995 – but it took quite a while before technology caught up with demand – enabling tech-savvy games studios to bring live streaming casinos to market.
Live dealer online casinos first emerged around 2006-2007, just before smartphones became widely available.
Initially, the conditions were not ideal for live casinos as they relied on video streaming, which required good internet speeds. However, as internet speeds improved and smartphones became more popular, live casinos were able to take advantage of the technology like high performance video compression and expand rapidly.
Evolution Gaming was particularly successful in this area, launching a new studio every year from 2013 to 2017 and debuting their first live game show title, Dream Catcher, in 2017. Their dominance in the live casino industry has allowed them to expand into Canada, the US, and Latin America.
Live casinos (sometimes known as live dealer casinos) bring an authentic casino experience to gamblers wishing to play real money casino games online.
With a focus on live-dealer table games and game-show style games, live casinos specialize in broadcasting live real-money casino games from land-based casinos worldwide and from licensed and regulated casino games studios.
With live-casinos, the focus is very much on live dealer games – live-streamed to your device (PC, Mac, Android) with real dealers keeping the action going.
Gambling at online live casinos enable you to:
- Play real-money casino games – streamed live to your mobile
- Interact with and engage in chat with dealers & live casino players who are playing in the same live-casino games as you.
- Game-select – playing games that can offer better payouts
- Relax – because you know the games are fair, since it’s impossible to tamper with the results / outcomes.
Online casinos with live dealers are just like land-based, brick mortar casinos in many ways:
- You will be able to see an actual real roulette or blackjack table with a professional dealer, for example – placing your bets before the wheel is spun.
- Dealers look the part – professional and well groomed, and of course they are trained just like the croupiers you find in land-based casinos
Live Casino Software Providers
Casino providers bringing live-casino technology to online casino brands worldwide include:
- Evolution Gaming
- Pragmatic Play
- Pariplay
- NetEnt
- Red Tiger Gaming
- Ezugi
- SmartSoft Gaming
- GoldenRace
and many more.
Popular Live Casino Games
Live dealer casino games continue to perform well in the casino industry. The most popular games include:
- Live Blackjack
- Live Dealer Baccarat
- Live Dealer Roulette (European, American, and French roulette)
- Live Dealer Poker (Texas Hold’em, Caribbean Stud, 3-Card Poker and more)
- Live Dealer Craps
- Live Dealer Sic Bo
Many casino games suppliers have developed and patented their own variants of popular casino games – for example Evolution Gaming has launched the very popular “double-ball roulette” game – with much success online and on casino floors.