Casino games
What is a live dealer casino?
Live dealer is a real table in a studio, filmed and streamed to your screen, with your bets placed through an overlay. The cards and the wheel are physical.
It solves the trust problem for people who do not like software shuffling, and it introduces a latency problem instead.
How a table runs
A dealer works a real shoe or wheel in a studio. Optical recognition reads the cards or the pocket and reports the result to the platform, which settles every seat.
Betting windows are short, usually ten to fifteen seconds, and they close whether or not your connection kept up. That is the format's one genuine hazard on a phone.
What it does to a handset
A live table is a video stream plus an interactive overlay. Expect somewhere around a gigabyte an hour at the higher quality settings, and expect the app to quietly drop resolution before it drops the stream.
Cellular handovers are the failure point. Walking from wifi to LTE mid-hand is where the better apps hold the session and the weaker ones drop you back to the lobby with a bet still live.
Across the operators on our board, live table counts range from a handful up past a hundred and fifty. More tables mostly means shorter waits at your stake level rather than a better product.
Limits and pace
Live minimums start lower than most people expect, often a dollar, and the top tables run into the thousands. The stake range on a single table is usually narrow, so the room is where you choose your level.
Pace is slower than software: about sixty spins an hour on roulette against several hundred on an automated wheel. Slower is cheaper, which makes live the better-value way to play the same game.