The live online casino feature has become a standard option

Unlike many other business sectors the gambling industry has not seen severe effects from our increasing love of the internet. There is no doubt that more and more of us are gambling online but real casinos, bingo clubs and even the high street betting shops so far appear to be able to survive and even prosper. In fact there are areas where it is the online casinos which have come under pressure from the real casinos rather than the other way round. The live online casino feature which we can now use to play certain casino games at almost every online casino was a direct response to those pressures and criticisms during the early stages in the development of online casinos. It is of course the betting shops that are most vulnerable because of their traditional reliance on fans of horse racing, greyhound racing and more recently gambling on football, and they are clearly not able to compete with the huge range of sports and sporting events which can be followed online. The bookmakers managing those betting shops are however claiming that it is only the Fixed Odds Gaming Machines which allow their customers to play casino games such as roulette in the shops that is keeping them viable. The current political pressures against these machines may therefore create the same sort of pressures on those shops that we are seeing in the high street retail sector. Fortunately that sort of negative impact of the internet does not appear to happening in the online casino sector, and although we can clearly play a much wider range of casino games online than we have ever been able to play at a real casino or even the slot machine arcades, those establishments still attract a significant number of regular customers. One of the reasons for that takes us back to why the live online casino option was so important to the first online casino operators and why almost every online casino now offers us the option to play casino games such as roulette, blackjack and baccarat streamed live to our screens from a remote studio with real dealers and importantly a real roulette wheel. It was of course the traditional casino game of roulette which was instrumental in the push to develop the live online casino feature in the first place because the casino software designers were unable to satisfactorily illustrate the movement of the ball on the virtual roulette wheel on our screens.

To understand the pressures which led to the establishment of the studios and the development of the software necessary to stream the games live to our screens, we have to go back to the time when online casino games were first added to the online sports gambling sites operated by the bookmakers. Almost every online casino game relies on a Random Number Generator or RNG to determine the winning number, card or symbol, but in those early days very few of us had ever heard of an RNG and we were being asked to trust that these machines were fair and that the games were not too heavily weighted in favour of the online casino site operator. It was therefore no surprise that the strange movements of the ball on the virtual roulette wheel as it tried to reach the number determined by the RNG began to raise a few doubts. Clearly those doubts could eventually undermine our trust in all the online casino games and not just the game of roulette. Something had to be done or the whole concept of playing casino games online might be collapse entirely. In view of the fact that the casino software companies were unable to resolve the problems with the computer graphics, the only solution was to use a real roulette wheel rather than an RNG to determine the winning numbers. That required real dealers and a studio from where the games could be streamed live to our screens, and of course a totally new form of software to make it work. The casino software company Playtech are generally credited with being the first to develop the necessary casino software to operate the live online casino option, but it is now available at almost every online casino and has become a standard feature across the sector. It is not however universally popular, and the vast majority of the online casino customers probably never use the live casino option even if they are playing a casino game for which it is available. There are several reasons why many online casino games players do not choose to play roulette in the live casino mode, the most obvious of which is the time limitation for placing their bets. Because unlike in a real casino the dealers cannot see the players they have to manage the games according to a specified time schedule, which means that there is a time limit on how long players have to place their bets on the roulette table. One of the big attractions of roulette is of course the option to place multiple bets on each spin of the wheel, and we have to remember that many of the people now playing casino games online may never have played roulette in a real casino and therefore have not experienced the hustle and bustle of a crowded table as people rush to place their bets before a new spin. They enjoy being able to place their bets in their own time and do not like being rushed. Another important feature of playing casino games at an online casino is that the minimum table stakes associated with most games are very small, but many online casinos have felt the need to raise those minimum stakes when the games are played in the live online casino mode. Their reasoning is of course perfectly understandable because employing real dealers and servicing a studio is considerably more expensive that making the games available on an internet site. They have therefore increased the minimum stakes to compensate for those increased costs.