Going Live
No trip to the Fair City is complete without a visit to the Fitzwilliam Card Club, the city’s legendary casino. The haunt of local poker legends Andy Black and Collette Docherty, and set within the walls of (ironically) a converted church, the club is small, friendly and cosier than a litter of kittens curled up in front of the fire with a good book. Which is very cosy indeed. So essential is this detour from the usual Dublin tourist agenda of Guinness factories and Temple Bars that I’ve managed to neglect the Fitz on every trip to Dublin I’ve had thus far. Oops.
Seeking to remedy the situation, I’m here this time not just to sample one of the best cardrooms in Europe, but to investigate a new phenomenon in online gaming. The Fitzwilliam is now home to Irish gamers Dublinbet’s Distance Gaming operation, Live Online Casino Dealer.
Backed up by Vuetec’s software, Live Dealer does pretty much what it says on the tin: online casino games, playable from your laptop or PC, but using live dealers operating out of a bricks n’ mortar casino, before your very eyes.
The Fitzwilliam now resembles a kind of cyborg casino. Conventional table games now jostle for space with roulette and blackjack tables that have been earmarked for conversion–hooked up with a sophisticated array of monitors and webcams.
I meet up with Vuetec’s CEO Marty Reiner, the brains behind Dublinbet’s Live Dealer operation. A graduate of MIT, New Yorker Marty was once a (small-time he insists) member of the famous blackjack card counting teams of the 1970s. He’s quick to point out that those days are firmly behind him.
How It Works
With the card games—blackjack, Hold ‘em vs the dealer, and punto banco, the playing cards have bar codes printed on them. The dealer in the casino scans these over a sensor as he deals them and they’re displayed graphically onscreen milliseconds later for you to see (I’m told that this has been ‘tested’ by one or two of the more enterprising casino-goers who’ve come along to the casino to check the system out and see if they can beat it, by watching the ball land on 7 on the roulette table before immediately calling their mate at home. Naturally, they’re too late as the delay is so minimal). Prompts from the players (‘hit’, ‘stand’ etc in blackjack) are relayed to the dealer and he is instructed to deal cards accordingly.
Roulette
As well as blackjack and punto banco, roulette is offered. Camera shots change as the game progresses, so as the ball is coming to rest, for example, the camera angle changes to a close up view of the board. After bets begin, a 30-second timer will count down, after which online players are locked out and no more bets can be made. Of course, real players in the casino bet on the table as normal with corresponding live cues from the croupier , and will be visible to anyone playing the game on their computer at home. This is all part of the inclusive feel of the operation. Tips from online players to the dealers are possible and will pop up on the dealer’s screen at the table (mic’d up, the dealer can in turn thank players).
Hold ‘Em vs the Dealer
An interesting twist on the hold ‘em game, the player (the player here being one of the potential thousands of players playing against the dealer at any one time) is dealt 2 cards as in traditional hold ‘em. Players can then make bets on whether they are ahead on the flop, turn and river. Again, as with blackjack and punto banco, the cards’ barcodes are scanned and displayed onscreen almost instantaneously. Bonuses are available for particular starting hands. It’s a nice little side game if you’re sitting at home playing an interminable hold ‘em tournament and you want a quick bit of action.
As we try out the game on a laptop upstairs from the casino floor, Marty explains the potential for this relatively unfamiliar game: “Since a lot of players are all playing the same hand, just imagine a sit ‘n’go tournament, each player starting with 100 chips, say, and we play 10 hands. Everyone gets exactly the same hands, so it’s just wagering and strategy. There’ll be a Tote board which shows where you are in the league table as the game progresses.”
It’s this kind of casino game tournament structure where Live Dealer comes into its own. Tournament games like this and tournament blackjack are growing in popularity in the US, but expect more interest in this coming to European shores. The scope for opening these games out to countries that have banned gaming is immense: tournament casino games like this effectively involve a much higher degree of skill.
Looking down the pipeline, classic blackjack and Caribbean Poker are on the way and Craps is in the development stage. The idea is to have live dice throwers at the table. When it comes to your turn, you get to choose which person throws the dice. Video recognition would be used to ‘read’ the dice’s pips. The only snag would be getting the camera to zoom in quickly on the area on where the dice fell. “We could play with big fuzzy dice, but I’d rather not!”
Basic Strategy Blackjack With Early Payout
The long winded way of saying Blackjack Early Payout, this is Vuetec’s special baby. Three hands are dealt out to the players (there are always 3 hands dealt out at any time). Two unique features of BSBJEP are the basic strategy part and the Early Payout offering. It’s not like regular blackjack where you can hit or stand. The game chooses the best thing to do as if you were a professional player. The player however can also cash out early. Strong hands are offered higher early payouts than weaker hands. The early payout figure is calculated based upon the average expected outcome of the hand as dealt, and the dealer’s “up” card. The player doesn’t have the choice to hit or stand, but he has the choice to exit the hand early, to take the money early. Bets can be closed out early for a small loss or profit, rather like closing out bets in spread betting. Les Golden would have a field day. Watch this space…
More intimate than roulette or punto banco, some card games are performed direct to camera and there is interaction between the players and the dealer. Players can chat live to the dealers, and the dealers, mic’d up and able to read chat boxes onscreen, can in turn welcome new punters to the table, commiserate on losing bets and congratulate the big winners.
Of course, on these internet player-geared games, there’s no need for dealers to ‘pay out’ or ‘collect’ chips–it’s all done automatically. Dealers therefore don’t have to be professionally-trained croupiers. In fact, Dublinbet prefers to use dealers who haven’t had professional training on those games.
We’re joined by Janice Alder, Vuetec Casino Operations Manager: “We prefer employing actors, students, salespeople, as they often are used to speaking directly to people. The idea of Live Dealer is the interaction factor with the players. We’re trying to achieve an entertainment feel akin to Vegas casinos. Traditional dealers accustomed to UK or Irish casinos can find that very odd. Also, they’re not used to just standing in front of a monitor, dealing to players in cyberspace. They find that a little odd, especially as we go 24 hours a day.” The balance between Janice’s ‘featured dealers’ and the professional live dealers at Fitzwilliam is what makes Dublinbet unique among live dealer sites.
With dealers on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the aim is to make the dealers firmly part of the operation. “We want to reach out. We’re not talking about giving out phone numbers, but we want that kind of MySpace feel. If players know their dealers, can choose their dealers, then the experience is even better.”
So how does Dublinbet’s system differ to the other live dealer sites out there? For a start, Dublinbet’s games do not require installation on the player’s PC. Games are built in a Java framework, making gameplay instant and accessible. Also, at the moment, Dublinbet’s is the only site coming from a live casino environment.
Marty Reiner: “The benefit for us and our players is that there’s no download. But there are other benefits too. To our players it says ‘Look, we’re real!’ Also, there’s never any need to put anything on your hard drive. It’s comforting for players–it’s one less thing for our players to worry about.
“When you’re sitting at an online casino with a RNG (Random Number Generator) and you’re playing blackjack, sitting there with 20, and the dealer has 15 and pulls a 6 to make 21, it feels terrible. But when you see it come out of a real live shoe, it just feels different. The few other online sites around will offer a person standing behind a wheel in roulette for example. It produces a result, sure, but there’s no atmosphere. With us, you can see what’s going on in the casino. Some players even change their betting depending on what the ‘live’ players are doing at the table.
“We believe fundamentally that we’re providing an entertainment service,” says Marty. “As close as possible, we’re trying to replicate the live casino experience online.”
“The main reason people stay is the trust factor. At the end of the day, there are hundreds of casinos out there. People want to know that their money is safe. If they’re playing roulette, they’re getting fair roulette. Also, our players get used to certain dealers. They come back because they like Janice or Lindsey or whoever, and our retention statistics of players are bigger than other online casinos.
“We’ve seen live dealers in Asia putting a TV in the background so players can see that online. We’re thinking of doing similar things here, dealers announcing football scores as they deal perhaps. This will further demonstrate how real-time our games are. Perhaps, also, you’re unable to get out to a live casino or you simply find the prospect of going to a bricks n’ mortar venue terrifying. Our service takes care of that.”
As I decamp upstairs to partake of the Fitzwilliam’s other highlight, the Monday night €75 Hold ‘em event, I eye a lonely-looking figure at the other end of the room–the dealer for the Hold ‘em vs the dealer game standing at a table dealing to the multitude of online gamblers. It looks strange, a solitary dealer in a tiny corner of Europe dealing potentially the biggest casino game in the world–and there’s not a soul around. Strange it may seem, but this could just be the future of gaming.l “As close as possible, we’re trying to replicate the live casino experience online”—Marty Reiner
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Posted by manhattan – 9 Jan 2008, 12:56 AM
Nice article. I think the future is all about non-download games. I really like the idea of internet play being live with a real dealer I also expect to see more player vs player tournament games where you play casino games like slots against each other, rather than against the house, with the house simply taking a rake from the play. www.penny-slot-machines.com