May 1, 2021
Live casinos have exploded in recent years. Higher speed internet is available to pretty much everyone so the tech needed to stream live images has – along with mobile internet access – gone global.
There’s a lot of choice in the live casino world and players might find themselves scratching their heads when they look at the huge array of sites.
We have done lots of guides to choosing a site. We’ll stick by our belief that the most important thing for any player at any site is that they find a safe site – meaning a legal, licensed site.
But this is about fun too, and that means playing games that you love.
With such a huge array of games to pick from what should you look for in your site?
This is what we think should be in every good live casino lobby.
First: The Big Three
Every live casino will offer at least these three games in our experience. They are the most popular casino game in the world, the most popular card game in the world, and the most popular game in East Asia respectively.
The biggest hitters of the casino world are:
Live roulette, live blackjack and live baccarat.
Live roulette brings a long heritage, a glamorous look and feel and some great and interesting bets. It’s also quite a complex game with a fair amount to understand and one that you should read up on or play in simulator form if you have the chance.
There are three main variants, European and French, which have better overall value, and American, which has some fun extra bets.
Check them out, and if you like the game so much you can’t get enough look for a high-speed or auto version.
Live blackjack is deceptively simple. Often ending after the first cards have been dealt it puts an onus on players to use betting strategy and to understand the mathematics of probability. It can repay skill in a marginal sense too.
Like roulette, it has variants and a set of popular side bets that allow players to chase bigger pay-outs. Make sure you know what each game demands of you before you play.
Live baccarat brings a game with tons of mystique. Invented in France but now most popular in East Asia the game is very often presented with East Asian and specifically Macau trappings. It’s simpler than all the jargon would make you think, usually playing off two hands against each other. Look up the best value betting in the casino and you should find baccarat at the top of the list.
Poker
Poker is the archetypal gambling card game, and yet in its classic form, you are extremely unlikely to find it in a casino. You’ll need to head to a poker room to take on a room full of other players for a pot, but you can play a lot of poker games in a casino, with players playing against a dealer’s hand.
The most popular games are the hold ’em variants, using a river of community cards; three card poker, and the high-speed Caribbean stud poker.
Almost all of these games have a large number of variants and plenty of side bets.
Dice games: Sic Bo and Craps
Sic BO usually gets bracketed with keno simply because both games have an East Asian heritage. However, it really belongs with craps, as it’s a dice game.
Sic Bo is much less common in real-life casinos and much more common in online casinos than craps.
Craps is complex to play and because the game depended on a player throwing a physical dice it hasn’t been easy to replicate. There is now a version of the game available, from Evolution Gaming, and we’ll see how it does.
Sic bo is a simple game, with three dice being thrown, and has incredibly complex betting. It’s a very fast game and – like a lot of East Asian games – has been trimmed down to a concentrated gambling experience, so make sure you’re playing safely.
Keno
Keno is a cross – sort of – between bingo and a lottery. It’s played in real life with giant frames of numbers. Players pick sets of numbers and the more they match from a random pick the more they win. There’s some good value betting to be had in keno but the gameplay is so simple as to be non-existent, so if you’re in it for sophisticated tactics then this isn’t the game for you.
Gameshows
Almost every live online casino now offers a game show or two.
These games are usually branded and often exclusive to a single site. They rely on high=tech and high-energy presentations to add pizazz to games that are often extremely simple.
Deal or No Deal is an obvious traveller from TV land, and the many lucky wheel games have also taken their cues from old TV shows.
You can now play slots in a similar way, with players joining together to side bet on a game played by a host.
How games are divided
Games are divided in a number of ways online.
You’ll find every game we’ve mentioned above available in a big variety of titles. There are betting variants, rule variations, and also presentational differences.
Betting limits are set by sites and may involve earning loyalty points in order to climb up to the big tables.
There are a number of big companies producing games. The giants are NetEnt, Evolution, Playtech and there are smaller stables from the likes of Pragmatic Play and Ezugi. All of these companies produce games in their own style and try to make them stand out with branding, presentational, and side bet options. Even better is to invent a new variant that can be made exclusive.
Picking games isn’t easy, so we’ll return to our first point – playing safely is the most important thing. Especially if you’re new to live casino games you should be setting limits for yourself and sticking to them and wagering small amounts on low-risk bets.
Enjoy!