Universal Appeal
Playtech live dealer set
“ Technology is always part of ( the future )— different kinds of technology , to be sure — obviously video , but also products using analytic technology applied to live gaming . This will allow us to make a leap of quality of experience for the users .”
— Edo Haitin , Managing Director of Live Dealer , Playtech
was on for the holy grail of live gaming online .
Todd Haushalter is the chief product officer for Evolution Gaming , the company that invented live dealer and now the dominant player in the B2B market . Haushalter was senior vice president of table games for MGM Resorts prior to joining Evolution .
“ It started with taking one of those simple Logitech cameras , and putting it in front of a roulette wheel and having the woman spin ,” he explains . “ She ’ d manually enter the winning number and live casino was born . Yeah . Roulette was the first product .
“ And remember in those days you didn ’ t have decent bandwidth ; it was really pushing the technological boundaries . The founders of Evolution made a huge bet and they built five tables and they decided to run them 24 / 7 — it ’ s labor intensive and nobody ’ s waking up in the morning looking for live dealer .
“ And it ’ s not like we were getting premium placement on the websites at that time either . Sometimes a whole shift would go by and there would be no players . Money was tight , but then players started to slowly trickle in .”
But getting to the next level wasn ’ t about the money for live dealer ; it was much more simple .
“ Then you saw live casino get its own tab ,” he says . “ So you ’ d have sports , sports betting and then casino and then live casino . So that was a huge win .”
Evolution was able at the time to refocus on its goals when it gained that acceptance .
“ The original mission was to bring the casino to online ,” Haushalter says . “ It took online gaming into a new genre where it lives today . Sure , it ’ s a hard business , because you ’ ve got half casino operations , and then half technical operations and video streaming . It ’ s a B2B business , so you ’ ve got to keep all your clients happy .”
Edo Haitin is managing director of live dealer for Playtech , a giant in the online gaming supplier field . He says Playtech got into live dealer about 15 years ago , and it was slow going at the start .
“ In the beginning , it was really like a stepbrother or sister for the main casino ,” he says . “ The technology was different back then ; we had to figure out what is live , what can be done with live , why even are we doing live ? That was the industry . And it was like that for quite a while . When I joined live around six years ago , I think that was the era that it started to be more popular .
“ But then the technology really changed . There was a boom in the streaming capabilities , and then it took off .”
Universal Appeal
So why wasn ’ t the player satisfied with the static electronic version of their favorite table game ? After all , the odds are the same and the decisions come much quicker . The player decides when the cards are dealt , not the live dealer .
According to Oliver Bartlett , the director of gaming for BetMGM , it caters to what the players want .
“ I think gambling at a table is quite familiar , almost as second nature , to a lot of Americans ,” he says . “ They prefer that kind of community feel , which obviously live casino gives far more than those RNG games . If I ’ m at the table with you , I can chat with you . I can chat with the dealer , and we
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