Golden Nugget Atlantic City Marries Live Casino Floor Roulette with Online Play
I will admit, even as a “poker/gambling writer,” I am not much of a gambler. Up until Black Friday – when online gambling became much more of a pain in the ass in the United States – I played online poker a lot, but at very low stakes. For me, it was just a fun hobby, as well as sometimes a necessity for work. (Oh, how I loved it when my former boss would give me $50 to deposit so I could write a review of a poker room.)
When I covered the World Series of Poker live at the Rio two consecutive summers, I rarely gambled. I would sometimes throw a few bucks into a video poker machine while I took a lunch break, but that was about it. And I don’t think I have ever played roulette in my life. Something about a game being all luck that just turns me off.
When I used to play online casino games, I stuck to small-bet blackjack solely to get enough hands to unlock a deposit bonus. The days of “bonus whoring” were incredible for a while – I could lose terrible playing blackjack, but because of the massive bonus, I’d still make some solid money. But man oh man, if there was live casino floor roulette, like what the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City just introduced, that I could have played online, I don’t know – I might have thrown a few bets down.
Golden Nugget has by far the most successful internet gaming business in New Jersey. In February 2018, it generated nearly $7.9 million in internet gambling revenue. Part of its offering is live dealer games, but last week, Golden Nugget launched live casino floor roulette, which is exactly what it sounds like: a real game of roulette, streamed live from Golden Nugget’s actual casino floor, on which players sitting at their computers can place bets. The company announced the launch on Wednesday, March 28th, even though the game began a week earlier.
Live dealer online casino games have been around for years. Much of the reason online casinos originally implemented them was to encourage the “online gambling is rigged” crowd to hop on board. Look! There is a real dealer with real cards that you can see! There’s no random number generator to cheat you here! They were also a way for smaller sites to try to differentiate themselves from the scores of mirror-image sites with the same games. The live dealer games have never become the primary form of online gambling for most people, but they have survived and carved out a nice little niche for themselves.
Up until this past week, live dealer casino games, at Golden Nugget or otherwise, were filmed inside a special studio designed specifically for such games. Multiple cameras film each table, with optical character recognition (OCR) technology translating the cards and roulette spin results into the proper outcomes for the players.
And that’s all cool, but Golden Nugget has now taken it to the next level, using what one would presume to be the same technology. Here, they’re training the cameras squarely on a table on the casino’s real casino floor. This is the same roulette table that you and your buddies might sidle up to on a trip to Atlantic City, but now everyone in New Jersey can place a bet on where the ball will land. The idea is to give customers as genuine of an Atlantic City gambling experience as possible. All the live, in-person casino visitors are there on camera, betting as they always do. Online players can see everything, hear everything, and participate along with the live players.
Not living in New Jersey, I can’t try it (which, for the first time ever, makes me want to visit New Jersey), but it seems pretty damn cool. As a press release stated, “….watching patrons at the Golden Nugget Atlantic City place bets alongside online patrons makes for an ever more authentic live casino feel.”
“By bringing the casino floor to online patrons, Golden Nugget Casino keeps innovating and further demonstrates that it is the online destination of choice for authentic casino players,” said Golden Nugget’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Online Gaming Thomas Winter in that press release.
Kfir Kugler, CEO of Ezugi New Jersey, the company which developed the live casino floor roulette product, added, “Innovation drives our product ethos and Live Dealer Casino Floor Roulette was a natural next step for us to collaborate on with Golden Nugget Casino and Golden Nugget Atlantic City.”
Browsing the Golden Nugget’s online gambling site, the live casino floor roulette game is available to play online around the clock, whereas the nine standard live dealer games (one casino hold’em, one baccarat, two roulette, and five blackjack) only run 2:00pm to 3:00am.
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