Mobile Live Casinos
If you don’t go online with a mobile device you are now in the minority! According to studies, in fact, this is old news: mobile browsing surpassed desktop internet access way back in 2021.
And the online casino world has been very much on top of this development, offering mobile games as soon as they could with many companies – both casino sites and game developers – now proclaiming themselves as “mobile-first” developers who design their products with mobile and small-screen users first in their mind.
It’s an exciting time to be a mobile internet user and it’s an exciting time to love live casino games.
The explosion in casino use has a new dimension in live casino games. These have massively taken off in the past few years. Every decent online casino site now has a live site, offering streaming live games, and there are some big moves going on in the industry – from mergers to new studios to new game breakthroughs.
But can you play mobile live casinos safely? And how do you get the best out of them and find the best sites in this massively complex and enormous world?
Let’s get into it!
What is a live casino?
The live casino is a trip back in time.
The industry is going back to the future by ditching a load of tech innovations and using another one to deliver an old-fashioned casino experience.
That’s right, live casinos are what they sound like: old-fashioned casino games played over an internet connection. The player users a user interface to send their decisions to the casino site and a member of staff at the casino site reacts to those decisions.
Wins are paid out into the player’s casino account.
Live casinos use film studios to film games with real-life staff running casino games.
Mobile live casino games
Most live casinos operate a large array of games, almost all of which come in a variety of forms.
The bare minimum is the Big Three of casino games: roulette, the most popular casino game of all; blackjack, the most popular casino card game; and baccarat, the biggest game in East Asian casinos.
However, you should also expect to find many more games at most mobile live casino sites.
These will probably start with a set of poker games, like:
Casino Hold’em, three-card poker, casino stud poker, Caribbean stud poker, brag and more.
Almost all live casino poker games are dealer games. In the classic game of poker players sit around a table and play against each other for a pot. In dealer games, players play a variant of the game – very often a simpler one – against a hand run by a dealer and win a pay-out determined by a paytable.
East Asian games
A small subset of games has its roots in East Asia, usually China.
These include:
Sic bo, a dice game of three dice with a complex set of betting options.
Keno, a cross between bingo and a lottery, with players betting on a random draw of numbers and winning pay-outs that grow the more numbers that match.
Dragon tiger, a baccarat variant, with a high/low bet that’s very much the essence of gambling boiled down.
Gameshows:
Gameshows are a new area in live casinos. These games are designed by game developers and are often exclusive to a single casino site. Most commonly they are versions of a Wheel of Fortune game and they offer presentational styles designed to make the games a social experience.
Slots. You can also now play live slots with a crowd of players betting alongside you.
Mobile live casino game variants
Casinos offer a large choice within each game style to mobile live casino players.
The most obvious choice is the rule variant.
In some cases, these rule variants go back hundreds of years. For example, roulette split into a number of rule variants as it travelled round the world: French, European and American. Each has its own betting rules, and the French and European variants have one zero compared to the two on the American wheel. This makes the American game – in general – more profitable for casino owners.
Blackjack also has a set of variants, including Vegas Strip and Atlantic City versions. Games allow players to take a number of different options at different stages in the game. Most notable are choices over doubling down on bets at some points, and splitting pairs into two hands. There are also different possible behaviours for dealers, who have a set of rules about when they must play on or when they must stand.
Poker comes with a dizzying variety of rules that we can’t cover here in detail.
The truth is that a lot of these rule variants are created in order to allow sites and developers to achieve some sort of exclusivity for their game – invent a new rule, give the game a slightly different name and you may be able to trademark it!
Mobile live casino games betting variants
Betting is another dividing line between games.
This works in a couple of ways:
One is side betting,
The second is the entry-level of the bets or the maximum bet allowed, a form of customer loyalty that is often rewarded in customer loyalty schemes.
Side bets are added to many games. These bets usually offer bigger pay outs than are available during the classic game. For example, in blackjack, there is a popular side bet called perfect pairs.
Perfect Pairs is a very simple bet: players bet that they will be dealt a matching pair of cards in their first two cards.
It pays out – this is an example, real-world pay outs may slightly differ – as follows:
- A pair of matched value cards from different suits and colours pays 5:1,
- A pair of cards that match in value and suit colour pays out 12:1, and
- A perfect pair pays out 25:1 for a perfectly matched pair.
- This is a much higher pay-out than you’ll find for standard hands.
- These bets have big pay-outs, but like most riskier bets they are also of better value for the casino, and may (this depends on the number of cards in the decks and other factors) have a house edge as high as 11%.
- In the same way, the 21+3 bet is popular and offers big pay-outs.
- This matches the player’s first two cards with the dealer’s face-up card, paying out for poker hands, for example:
- A flush of suit-matched cards pays 5:1,
- A straight of consecutively numbered cards pays 10:1,
- Three of a kind (not matched by suit) pays 30:1,
- A straight flush is worth 40:1, and
- A suit-matched triple pays out at 100:1
Again, these are attractive numbers, but the house edge is high.
Mobile live casino games betting levels
Loyalty is something we sometimes celebrate and sometimes denigrate: you’re an obstinate tribalist, I’m loyal. . .
In business, it’s a way to reward customers who spend money with you, and, in doing so to encourage them to spend more.
Loyalty schemes are controversial in the live casino world. There has been a lot of interest in safe gambling in recent years as problems around addictive gambling have got more publicity and it’s become obvious the extent to which the industry both uses marketing tricks to encourage players to spend more and depends on high spenders for its profits.
Loyalty schemes are common despite this criticism and most of them are extremely simple: you spend money, your money is converted into some form of a points system, the points are tallied up, and they are finally get converted back into money for you or some other form of credit.
Loyalty schemes typically offer non-cash rewards too, which may include better levels of service, faster pay-outs, personal advisers and so on, as you progress through the ranks.
They are commonly used to allow players to access better levels of service or particular games in live casinos.
Live casinos usually rank their tables by their betting level.
This may be a maximum bet or a minimum bet. For example, we looked at a big mobile live casino site and found this ranking:
Blackjack VIP offering betting from £50 to £15,000, standard blackjack tables offering betting from £20 to £5,000, £15 to £5,000, £10 to £5,000, and £5 and £1 to £5,000. There are also games with top limits of £250, £1,000, £2,000, £10,000 and more.
These levels of betting may open up to players the longer they spend at a site and the more they spend. Most loyalty schemes aren’t just open to every player, players are automatically enrolled in them when they sign up. However, VIP schemes, Salon Prive and other similarly-named schemes are usually offered to players on an invitational basis.
Spend enough and you’ll get asked along to the private club.
We’ll talk a little more about safe gambling later on, but this is certainly something that you should be aware of if you’re being asked to join such a scheme.
You’ll be offered goodies in order to keep you playing. Fine. But you need to be aware that you’re being offered these bonuses because you’re likely to leave a lot of that money behind with the casino. Casinos in Las Vegas don’t give free suites, liquor and more to players who spend a lot with them because they’re frightened the house is going to lose a lot of money to them – it’s the other way around.
Mobile live casino games presentation
Mobile games are almost always played in exactly the same way as their desktop equivalent, though there may be a small difference in the control panel, which may offer controls that float over the main screen rather than at the bottom of the screen.
However you play these games you’ll find a load of presentational gimmicks on offer that will encourage you to pick a particular game.
For this example we’ll look at roulette and see what presentational styles are available:
We looked at this example during a major football tournament, and immediately it was obvious that this was a big influence: the site we looked at also offered sports betting, so there’s an obvious link.
Otherwise, there were colour-coded games.
There were more sports-themed games.
There were several branded games: lightning roulette, quantum roulette, Mega Fire blaze roulette, for example.
There were roulette games that showed you they were being played in a studio, and roulette games that looked like they were being played in a live casino, there were roulette games that were themed to Macau (the Chinese territory where gambling is legal, as it is not in much of China).
There were high-speed games, and automatic games, games actually filmed in real-life casinos, and games in most European languages.
All this variety from one game – without taking into account rule variants and money.
Mobile live casinos – app or website?
In the mobile internet world there is a big choice for all users to make: to download or to not download.
Pretty much every mobile device has a good quality browser that will allow you to use a site just as well as if you had a desktop.
But a lot of sites would like you to download an app that allows you to access their site – and perhaps some exclusive content.
What should you do?
The choice is yours and there are up and downsides to whichever choice you make.
If you download an app you may get extra content, more games, or a better service. However, the functionality of apps is very variable and you should check out what you’ll get: some apps aren’t much more than a link to the site, for example.
The reason why sites would like you to download an app is, we think, they believe it will make you more likely to use their site more often.
We can’t give you any scientific studies on this, but it certainly makes sense: you’ve gone to the trouble of downloading and installing a piece of software onto your device, so you have shown some sort of commitment to the site in question. And there’s going to be an icon there on your screen inviting you to tap on it.
If the site is a good one and you enjoy it that’s not a problem. The fact is, shopping around can be a bad thing for players, particularly if you’re always chasing bonuses.
This isn’t very helpful advice we know, but as ever, we urge you to do some research into any site or product that you use.
Mobile live casino site safety
A mobile device or an app doesn’t make you any safer. There’s a lot of focus in the industry on safety in a number of ways, and there are lots of tools that players can use now.
We put site safety into three categories:
The site itself,
Your device and the web, and,
Personal safety.
All are important, and all of them are complex areas that demand a certain amount from the player.
Sites are generally safe – we will never recommend an unsafe one – but you need to keep your wits about you and know how to spot a wrong ‘un. The best pointer to a site being a right ‘un is that it is licensed by the relevant authority. For example, in the UK, the regulator is the UK Gambling Commission, it is illegal to offer gambling services without a licence from the regulator and you should run away from any site that tries to get around that rule if you are playing from the UK.
Check that licences are real and up to date.
Your device is also a potential source of online trouble. Make sure that it is up to date and secure. Software updates usually include some sort of security improvement, so it’s worth downloading and installing updates from trusted sources, including casino apps, as and when they become available.
You also need to keep your accounts safe. Don’t use passwords in more than one site, and learn how to set safe passwords that are hard – or impossible – to crack. Use an online password service if you feel you need to.
Finally, you need to keep yourself safe.
This is very important so it gets a section of its own:
Safe Live Mobile Casino Gambling
When you use mobile sites you may well have access to gambling on a 24/7 basis. It’s easy to see how that might be a problem if you are potentially at risk from gambling problems like addiction.
First of all, we’ll cover a couple of specifics of live casinos that make them slightly riskier than other sites.
The first is the price. Because live casinos need to be staffed they usually cost more to play at. This can mean higher lower bet limits. It also means it is very rare to get the chance to play games for free. Keep this in mind when you consider mobile live casino offers, that are likely to have very heavy restrictions on the money you are given. The fact that you can’t play for free means you can’t practice in a no-risk scenario either. If you’re unsure as to the rules of a game you’d like to play then make sure you check it out on a random number generator game (RNG) or watch a video of the gameplay – there are lots of these on YouTube.
The second is the social aspect of the game. A growing body of evidence is showing that some people can fall prey to addictions around social media and other types of internet use. Bringing a social aspect into the casino brings this risk into the picture for players.
And, when we go back to the site we used as an example in this guide and check out the dealers in the most elite part of the site there’s something else that comes into play: sex.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist, a prude, or ultra-religious to notice that casino staff are very often young and conventionally attractive. They are very often dressed in uniforms that emphasise this too.
You are encouraged to learn their names, and good dealers, to whom you can talk in private chat rooms, are a legitimate attraction in any casino.
However, when it comes to gambling you need to be sure that you are playing games and spending money because you are enjoying the games and you can afford to spend the money.
You should be making decisions about your gambling based on what is good for you – not because you want to impress staff or other players (all of whom you should treat with the utmost respect at all times, of course).
You also need to learn about safe gambling behaviour more generally. Most people can play gambling games online without any problem, but it seems clear that a small subset of players will get into trouble of some sort.
So do some research into safe gambling and the tools you can use to keep safe, from ways to limit your play to organisations you can reach out to for help if you do need it.
Mobile live casinos in conclusion
Mobile live casino play can be fun and rewarding.
Your first priority should be your own safety.
Then you can go about having fun and looking for the best sites. There’s a huge sub-structure of review and affiliate sites that rate casino sites, and there are forums where players meet and discuss them too.
There’s a lot to rating a site so be prepared to do a bit of work before you sign on: learn about bonuses, payment methods, customer service, safe gambling, licensing and more, and then take a look around before you download or sign up.
And then have fun! The live casino world is big and vibrant and is keeping alive games that have been enjoyed for hundreds – maybe thousands – of years.
Mobile Live Casinos FAQ
Are mobile live casinos safe?
Most sites are safe these days, but it’s down to players to know how to spot safe sites and to check them for legality and quality before they sign up. You must never play at sites that aren’t licensed for you to play in the place from which you are playing. And you must be sure that you are following the rules too – don’t try to get around age or geographical restrictions. Check if licensing is up to date and that the site is what it says it is with a secure connection. If you’re using a mobile then make sure you have enough power and enough data to complete any game you’re loading up.
What is a mobile live casino?
There aren’t really any sites these days that aren’t mobile live casinos, in that there are very few sites that don’t offer a mobile site – either in the shape of an app or a mobile site – and very few that don’t have a live casino attached. There are a few slots-only sites, but we haven’t seen one for a long time. A live casino is simply a site that offers games that are played via f filmed link over the internet. The player makes decisions using their device and transmits them to remote staff who play the game on their behalf – spinning the wheel or dealing cards and handing out wins and raking in losses.
Can you play all games on mobile live casinos?
Most games, yes. The industry has gone mobile-first, meaning that almost all new games are now made with the mobile user experience considered first and foremost. There was a time when streaming large amounts of live video to a mobile device would have been a dream, but the tech has advanced enough that this is a standard issue in the vast majority of the casino industry. And, remember, these need to be super-reliable connections with no lag and no buffering or interruptions to services. Most sites offer most games to all users, but you can check the site by having a browse around before you sign up. Most sites have an FAQ that will answer most of your questions.
What are the best games at mobile live casinos?
That’s up to you, but you will certainly have a lot of choices. You should find all of the usual casino games, starting with the big three: blackjack, roulette, and baccarat. On top of that, you will almost certainly find a selection of poker games. You should expect to see the likes of Keno and Sic Bo too. Finally, most sites now offer gameshow games (often exclusive to their site), live slots, and some version of a sports studio set up.
What companies make mobile live casino games?
There are a relatively small number of live casino developers. By far the biggest and best known is Evolution Gaming. Evolution were founded in the Baltic states and now have studios around the world. They make a huge variety of games including some of the most popular in the live casino world, and they’ve just taken over, NetEnt. NetEnt are best known as a slots producer but also produce a large selection of live casino games. Their titles are iconic and you can now play live versions of their slots. Playtech are probably the biggest live gaming software company in the world – that’s what they claim – and they now have a big stable of live games to add to their huge slots collection, which is also going live. You will also see games from Ezugi, who have specialised particularly in Asian markets and Asian games, and Pragmatic Play, a smaller slots company that have about a dozen live games.
What mobile live casino game has the best value?
True casino games are hard to rate in the same way that slots are rated. All gambling games these days, are given a rating called the RTP, or the theoretical return to player. This records the performance of the game over its lifetime, and always shows a small profit (the house edge) for the casino owner. While a slot might easily be rated as a 96% RTP, a roulette table’s rating in the 90s is much more complex. Roulette as a game may return those figures over its lifetime, but the game itself offers a complex variety of betting options, all of them with different odds and different pay-outs. Sometimes the best value is shared between two games, for example, blackjack is very good value with a high RTP for the standard game, and baccarat’s best bet is probably the best value bet of any anywhere in the casino.
Are mobile live casino dealers fair?
Yes, all licensed sites will use trained staff and offer fair games that have been audited. It is possible for dealers to rig games, but it is probably much harder to do in a live casino – with everything filmed with hundreds of watchers – than it is in a real-live casino. Dealers should be treated with respect and kindness, they have a demanding job and they’re probably not all that well paid for what they do. Be respectful.
Is gambling addiction a problem with mobile live casinos?
Yes, it is. All gambling carries with it the potential of addiction. The fact that mobile can mean carrying around permanent access to a casino in your pocket adds a new dimension. It is perfectly possible to play online live casino games safely, but you should at least be aware of potential problems, learn how to spot them, and know what tools you can use to help you if you do get into trouble. Keeping things fun is a great tip, and not worrying about trying to win money is too. Set limits and stick to them and be aware of your gambling behaviour ever starts to have an emotional edge to it.