Live Casinos

But how does live casino work? Where is a live casino? We know that there are a ton of questions related to live casino, so let’s go through them together. Live casino is actually live, which means that there are plenty of live dealers that change shift every now and then. So, if you play for longer periods or just more often, you’ll eventually see how the dealer is changed to someone else – just like with land-based casinos. Besides having a lot of dealers, the live casino also works through cameras and green screens. The cameras are obvious, otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to see the dealers and that would defeat the purpose of having a live casino. But what about green screens? Well, actually, not all live casinos have green screens. The ones who have green screens offer it so that the background can be accommodated to wherever it is displayed. The ones who don’t have green screens on the other hand, usually are a part of a solid feature or is exclusive to a specific online casino.

VIP Live Casino

Exclusive, you might think. Yes, the different live casinos are offered by game providers. These live casino providers can be NetEnt or Evolution gaming, to just name two. These providers can have exclusive and fun games for specific online casinos like pirate-themed Tuesday or blackjack with this week’s football game. They can even offer specific dealers that are only available for a specific casino or even exclusive invite-only VIP roulette or other table games where the player can bet higher amounts or is treated especially nice. If you’re interested in how to become a VIP player, you can check out our in-depth article where we tell you exactly what to do and what kind of casino to invest in. 

Let’s go back to live casino and how it works. How do we play at a live casino? It’s incredibly easy, all you have to do is find a specific game that you are interested in and then start the game. If you’re not sure if you want to join the table, you can hang out and watch other players place their bets, see how the dealer interacts with the players in chat and by the table before you decide to join. If you don’t like the table you can leave, without anyone noticing or having a bad excuse. Once you feel like you have the right table, you can join and start playing immediately. Bets on live casino are usually anything from a couple of euros up to €10,000. And you might ask, can we play live casino on mobile? The short answer is yes. Depending on the game provider, you will be able to play just as easily through your phone or tablet as through your desktop. The only difference is that your screen is probably a bit smaller.

How is live casino regulated?

Just like with any other casino related game or betting, there will always be a question of whether it is rigged. So, is live casino rigged? Live casino is, just like slots, highly regulated and it can’t be and is not allowed to be rigged. These games are usually provided by large game providers because the minimum financial requirement for providing a live casino game is usually a bit higher than regular slots. These large game providers usually already have a license in a highly regulated country and have specific laws and regulations that they have to follow, or they lose their license and/or have to pay extremely high fees. The fees are usually based on how much revenue the provider or casino has earned on a specific non-compliance, and whatever that sum is, the fee is usually twice that. This means that there is no incentive whatsoever for a highly regulated licensed online casino or game provider to cheat or rig their games.

But how is the game regulated? First off, we have to dive deeper into something we haven’t covered yet when it comes to how the games work. When it comes to any game that involves cards, there are entire books just on the different rules that are applied to the game. Things like how the cards must be shuffled, how many decks must be involved per game, how the cards must be stored and handled, etc. But how can the card be displayed and registered digitally, if the actual card is a physical entity on a table, miles away from the player? The secret are small chips that are located inside of the cards or bar codes on the face of the card, along with a card reader at the base of the deck, inside the table. Next time you load up a live casino online game of blackjack, baccarat or poker, you will be able to see how the dealer kind of scans the card each time they pick a new card from the deck. This scanner is directly connected to a computer that communicates with the game server where your bets are placed. 

Live Casino Betting

When it comes to roulette or even live monopoly, the host or dealer is trained in how to spin the wheel or the ball, and the rest is based on specific timers to make sure that each spin (with the ball or of the wheel) is random and that the dealer can’t change or manipulate it. And is there such a thing as live casino betting? Someone once said, if you can dream it, you can do it. Right now, Evolution gaming has the game Football studio, where you can play card games while hearing the dealers commentating on the current football game that is also playing. This game combines your favorite games while you can enjoy a beer on the couch while playing and listening to the commentators, without losing your concentration on the football game or the card game. 

Which one is the best live casino then? If you want the best game provider, we are very impressed with both of the giants, Evolution Gaming and NetEnt, but there are plenty of more providers to discuss and that might be even better. If you want to check out some of the live casino games, you can try one of the casinos in our list of best casinos right now, or you can read more below. 

Best Live Casinos

Which kinds of casinos offer live casino? It can be any large or small online casino, we will go through some of them here, but there are thousands of other online casinos that hosts live casino games on their site. If you want to see more of the online casinos that offer live casino, you can check out our list of casinos or our live and online casino reviews.

Leo Vegas is one example of a casino that offers live casino play with their own brand, all you have to do is to choose Live Casino at their website to find tons of live casino games. Leo Vegas offers several game providers, have a great variety of games, and have their own live casino games. There are also online casinos like 888 Casino that offers live casino with live roulette, blackjack, baccarat and tons of more games. Although they aren’t offering as many different tables, 888 Casino still has a large variety of live casinos to play at. We also want to highlight Bet 365 that offers several kinds of live casino as well, even though they might be mostly known for their sports betting. Another sports betting casino is Betway, which also offer several different live casino tables on their website. And last but not least, we want to highlight William Hill and their live casino, where they offer over 40 tables just for blackjack, 8 game shows, 18 roulette tables and much, much more. So, whenever you want to try out some live casino, you should check out our list of casinos with live casino games. Maybe you will find a new favourite?

Live casino bonuses

We hear it all the time, players requesting bonuses that can be used for live casino websites. It is certainly common within online casino to not offer wagering on bonuses used on live casino. This is because it’s not as easy to regulate the bet amounts on live casino, and you can quickly go over maximum bet amount or do something else that might forfeit your bonus and your winnings. However, not everyone strictly forbids wagering on live casino and not everyone sets the wagering percentage to zero with live casino. There are plenty of online casinos where you can use your bonus on live casino games, and you can find them all in our list of online casinos. 

But what about the free play on the live casino? Is it possible to play live casino with no deposit bonus? Of course, these are called free chips and are offered by a ton of casinos that offer live casino gambling. You can find these as well under our reviews or over at the list of casinos section. We’d love to help you find the best offers for you. Just keep in mind that live casino promotions might change from week to week or even day to day. So, if you’ve been looking at a particular deal for a while, we recommend that you consider taking it today before the offer is gone or replaced with a worse live casino promotion.

What about playing for real money? That’s also easy, you just make a deposit and start up a game and you can play live casino with real money right away. If you need any help or want us to make a guide for how to play live casino, you should let us know. We can also help you out with comparing different live casinos in a comparer if there is any need for it. We have a ton of options, and all we need is for you to let us know what you want. 

To give you a bit of a feel for what kind of guide we can help you with, you can find our short guide to live casino below. We will not go into the fine details, but it might help you get a feel for what the live casino world can offer.

Cards in live casino

The different live casino games online are card-based table games, table games, live slots, and even live game shows. First, let’s check out some options when it comes to card-related live casino games online. Games that are offered by the live casino are usually not too different from the games that are offered by a land-based casino.

Blackjack

The most common card-related live casino game is blackjack. If you’ve never played it but you’ve heard your friends talk about it, there’s no need to be confused any longer. The basic rules of the game are the same regardless if you’re playing with your friends or at a live casino blackjack table. Everyone is dealt two cards, including the dealer. Each card has a numeric value, and your goal is to not go over 21 points, while simultaneously having a higher value than the dealer. If the dealer is closest to 21 without going over, the house wins. If you’re closest to 21 without going over, you win. After the first two cards are dealt you can decide if you want another card, no more cards, double your bet or split your cards so that you have two hands (only possible if your cards have the same value). The values of the cards start at 1 and go up to 10. An ace is worth either 1 or 11, depending on the rest of the cards in your hand. The cards 2 to 10 are worth their respective numbers and all of the remaining face cards are worth 10 each. 

Even if you’ve heard of the game before and know how to play it, did you know that the rumored name for the card game came from early American casinos? The story goes like this, in the early 1900s, the casinos wanted more people to play the game, then called “twenty-one”, and offered bonuses to players who had the ace of spades and any blackjack (jack of spades or jack of clubs) in their dealt hand. The hand was then called a blackjack. The game is also famous for another reason, there are tons of attempts at counting cards and “beating the system”. Unless you have a time machine, you won’t be able to successfully pull off one of these cheats though, since they are not working with the current methods that the land-based, as well as online casinos, use.

Baccarrat

Next up among the usual card-related live casino games is baccarat. It’s a card game of chance, where you count points on the different cards just like in blackjack, but you don’t have to make any decisions yourself, besides on how you want to bet. The goal of the game is to guess and bet on the one who will have the highest number. Only the “player” and the “banker” play the game, but there can be hundreds of players betting per game. The cards are dealt both to the player and the banker. If the player gets a number between 0 and 5, a new card is drawn for the player. The highest number in this case wins. If the player has anything above 5, no more cards are drawn for the player and whichever one has the highest number wins. But if the player has either 6 or 7 points and the banker’s cards are worth 5 points or less, the banker draws a card. Sometimes both the banker and the player draw one card each, but it’s a bit of a complicated table and it’s automatically applied each time, so we won’t go over it here. If you want to know the exact details, you can read more in the rules of the live casino game of baccarat. 

Baccarat vs. Blackjack

The difference between the value of the cards in baccarat and blackjack is that in baccarat, an ace is worth 1 point, 10 and face cards are worth 0. That means that the highest number in baccarat is 9. Whenever two cards make a two-digit number, the first digit is removed. For example, if you get cards 6 and 7, their collective value is 13 – but since we remove the first digit, the actual value of the combo is 3. That’s a lot of numbers to keep track of. If you find yourself playing baccarat with your friends, try not to cheat. That’s a lesson that a friend of King Edward VII learned in 1890 when a big scandal about baccarat was all over the news. It seems like this is the point when baccarat really became famous in Europe and the rest of the world.

Poker

And last, but not least among the most common card-related live casino games is poker. This is yet another classic game that most people have tried at least once in their lives. Poker is basically about betting on which hand is better according to the different rules that are defined by the game. There are several different kinds of poker, like Texas hold ’em, Stud, and three-card poker. In the last one, you’re playing against the house and all three mentioned are the most common poker games available in the live casino. However, there are still plenty of more at different casinos so if you don’t find the game you like right away, you can always have a look at another casino. You can find all of the casinos that offer live casino poker or other games here at ViaBonus.

Roulette and other table games at live casinos

What other games are available in the live casino world? One of them is roulette, you can’t really find any casino that offers live casino but doesn’t offer live casino roulette. If you’ve never played the game before, you basically have a spinning wheel with small pockets with numbers on them, with alternating red and black colors. Then there’s a ball that the dealer spins in the opposite direction, around in a groove at the top of the roulette. As the ball loses momentum, it slowly rolls down towards the pockets with numbers. When the ball falls onto the wheel, it will settle in one of the pockets and whatever number it falls on is the winning roulette number. With roulette, you can bet on the color, the specific number, odd numbers, even numbers, and sometimes even green. Betting on the green is the riskiest, as there are only one out of 37 (or two if 38) slots that are green and this one is usually marked with 0.

Craps

Besides roulette, there is also craps. This is a dice game with a lot of simple rules, everything is based on the roll of the dice. Your first roll is a “come out” roll and the rest of the rolls are “point” rolls, the important thing to remember is to throw against the edge of the board. Craps is a really popular game in land-based casinos, but it’s not seen as much, or even at all, at the live casinos. If you love craps, you should check out games like Evolution gaming’s Lightning Dice – this is a game where the show host puts three dice into a see-through dice roller. You bet on what the dice will show and once the lever is pulled, the dice will make their way through the roller and whoever got the number right, wins.

Monopoly an other table games

But that’s not the only games available, there are also live casino slots, game shows like monopoly or deal or no deal and other exciting live casino table games. We won’t go into further detail about these games right now but save ViaBonus in your bookmarks to get new and interesting articles in the future where we might introduce you to a brand-new game that you will fall in love with. Whether you’re looking for an online casino with live roulette, blackjack, craps or other table games right now, we’re sure that we have the casino for you in our list of the best online casinos of 2020. We wish you the best of luck on your live casino journey.