Live Dealer Casinos: How They Work Behind the Camera

Live dealer games stream a real table from a purpose-built studio, with software reading the physical outcome and settling bets automatically.

Optical character recognition (OCR) watches the shoe, the wheel or the table and converts what happens physically into data the platform can settle against. That is why chips, cards and wheels are marked and lit the way they are.

Latency shapes the format. Betting windows exist because the stream reaches players with a delay of a few seconds, so bets must close before the outcome is generated. If your connection lags badly, you lose betting time rather than gaining an advantage.

Game shows and derivatives — money wheels, multiplier formats and hybrid RNG rounds — usually carry a higher house edge than classic blackjack or baccarat. The bright presentation does not change the maths, and side bets are almost always worse value than the main bet.

Limits and dedicated tables. Operators often rent branded tables from a studio. A table carrying a casino's name is generally still run by the studio, under the studio's own licensing and testing.

Everything you would check on an RNG game applies here too: the house edge on the specific bet, the table limits, and whether live games count toward any bonus wagering — very often they do not.