Live dealer casinos are the closest you can get to the Vegas experience without leaving your home. They offer the real casino experience, from real professional dealers to the chatter and atmosphere that make traditional casinos exciting.
Plus, you can play at a live dealer online casino at any time. But how exactly do live dealer casinos work? Are they as transparent and trustworthy as land-based casinos? In this article, we’ll look at how live dealer casinos work and the technology behind it.
What Is a Live Dealer Game?
A live dealer casino game is played with a real human dealer instead of the Random Number Generator (RNG) systems used in standard online casino games. The games run in real-time and are live-streamed, allowing you to watch as the deck is shuffled, just as you would in a traditional casino. These professional dealers play a huge role in improving the transparency and trustworthiness of online casino games. They also interact with players through live chat, adding a social element to the experience.
Key Components of a Live Dealer Casino
A lot goes behind the scenes to make live dealer casinos possible, from live gaming software to optical character recognition (OCR) and user interface technologies. This can be costly to implement, and as a result, many online casinos opt to use shared tables instead of owning their live casino tables.
Some of the key components of live dealer casinos are:
Studio
A studio is simply a space from where a live dealer game is produced and broadcast. It may be a professional studio, an office, or even a real casino floor with gaming tables for different casino games like blackjack, poker, and roulette. Besides the equipment, the studios must have a dealer station with all the necessary game tools.
Cameras
You can’t host a live dealer game without cameras. And you need more than just your standard camera setup for some live dealer games. Many live dealer casinos require multiple camera angles to enable players to switch between different camera angles to get a closer look at the cards.
On top of that, some live dealer casino cameras are integrated with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). When playing poker, baccarat, or blackjack, the technology translates the card’s symbols and numbers into digital data as they are dealt. Additionally, OCR is used to quickly verify game results allowing players to immediately receive their winnings.
Dealer’s Monitor
Dealers have a monitor to track players and bets made. It shows game progress and player actions, allowing dealers to make informed decisions. From here, dealers can also View messages from players, which they can then respond to in the stream.
Additionally, dealer monitors have game controls like a timer for managing the start and end of rounds. System alerts are also displayed on this monitor to notify the dealer of any issue that needs to be addressed or resolved.
Game Control Unit
Live dealer casinos also feature a Game Control Unit (GCU), which encodes every game activity and transmits it to players. It’s integrated into the casino table, allowing dealers to quickly scan cards before showing them to the players.
But how does it work? Each Blackjack card has a magnetic strip containing all the necessary information. When scanned, the GCU translates this information and displays it on player screens.
User Interface
Besides the studio equipment and software, live dealer casinos also need capable client applications. Whether a website or mobile app, it should offer players a video stream window, a bet placement section, and a live chat box or pop-up. The UI design significantly influences the whole live dealer casino experience, but most live dealer casinos offer a seamless one.
