Modern live dealer Blackjack games are a technological marvel – some developers have even created software that allows you to virtually take a seat at a real casino blackjack table. You can play alongside patrons of the casino as if you were actually there with them – but how does it work?
The Beginnings
Two companies are credited with creating the first online casinos – Cryptologic and Microgaming. Cryptologic has been split up into different companies which have been bought and sold several times since they created their first online casinos in 1995. Microgaming, on the other hand, is still around and is still producing online gaming software to this day.
Both companies were experimenting with live dealer games as early as 1998, but the technology available at the time was not ideal for the task. Fast internet connections are a must for streaming high-quality, high-resolution video, and the dial-up modems that most people were using to connect to the internet at that time simply didn’t have enough bandwidth to make such games possible.
Making it Possible
It wasn’t just internet connections that were slow in 1998 – many people still had older 486 based computers, which struggled to run Windows 98 at a usable speed. Technology was advancing extremely rapidly at this time and purchasing a new computer with a Pentium 2 or AMD K6 processor provided performance as much as 10x greater than a machine which had been purchased in 1995.
Online casinos were also improving at a dramatic rate between 1995 and 1998 – the convenience of playing at an online casino was impossible for many gamblers to ignore. Everyone wanted to try their luck online, and live dealer games provide a much more realistic experience than other online casino software.
Around 1998, Microgaming decided that enough people had the computers and connections necessary to try launching a live dealer game. The internet was still in its infancy back then and the games were far from perfect. Bearing all these limitations in mind, player expectations were unrealistically high.
If the video did not stay in sync with the other technologies being used, some people thought they were being cheated by these early games. So, how did they work? And how were they improved into the modern, accurate representations of casino games that allow you to play online blackjack in NJ today? Let’s investigate…
Streaming Video
This is the basis for a live dealer casino game – the player needs to be able to see the table, the dealer, and their cards in real-time. Dial-up modems provided a maximum speed of 56KBps, which is just not sufficient for high resolution video. Early broadband connections were a huge improvement, usually providing speeds of at least 512Kbps, perhaps even as high as 2048Kbps (2MB/s).
The casino must choose what connection speed to target with their live dealer casino games – if they streamed the games at 2MB/s, it would have limited the number of people who could play their new game to only those with the fastest internet connections.
For this reason, online casinos such as Unibet NJ would usually encode their live dealer games at a bit rate of around 300 – 400Kbps, which meant that everyone with any type of broadband internet connection should be able to play the game in real-time.
Cards with RFID Chips
Land-based casinos had been experimenting with chipped playing cards for many years, and online casinos looked to this technology as a way of improving their live dealer games. The dealer takes a card from the shoe and moves it over the scanner built into or under the table. This allows players to see the total of their cards separately to the cards themselves, ensuring they do not make any mistakes.
Should the dealer make a mistake, the logs from the card scanner can be used by the casino as a way of checking the results of each hand, allowing any dealer mistakes to be easily rectified. The use of these cards made dealer errors much less likely, however, as they were able to see the total of each player’s hand on a screen above their head, out of view of the cameras being used to stream the table to the players.
Automated Shuffling Machines
Blackjack and Baccarat are often played using six or eight decks of playing cards. Ensuring that hundreds of cards are properly shuffled would take an experienced dealer several minutes prior to the introduction of these machines. Sometimes a continuous shuffling machine will be used, where the cards are put back into the machine after every hand, ensuring that the cards are in a completely random order for each hand.
Continuous shuffling machines are disliked by some players because they prevent card counting, but the use of such a machine actually improves the RTP for the player because the valuable aces and tens are not removed from the shoe at the end of each hand.
For example, without a continuous shuffling machine, the Ace of Spades can only appear on the table once between shuffles. With such a machine, the Ace of Spades can appear in every hand.
Real-time Editing
This is the area where early live casino games struggled – the information from the tagged cards needs to be overlayed with the video of the dealer in real-time. If the two things become out of sync, players can feel cheated – how does the result of the hand appear on screen before the dealer has taken the cards from the shoe?
The truth is that the streaming video in this scenario is just lagging behind the overlay from the card scanner, but it’s easy to see why players might feel cheated when these two things become out of sync.
Where We Are Today
With faster connections and better software, the live dealer games available today always keep everything in sync – this gives a better experience for players and causes less issues for the casino. Players can often chat between themselves, tip the dealer, and generally interact much more like they would if they were at a real casino. For the developers of live casino games, this will always be the aim – bringing the experience as close to being at a real casino as possible.
Who knows what new technologies will bring to games tomorrow?
