A live casino table runs on real cards and real wheels. A studio dealer shuffles, deals and flips them, and no software decides the outcome. Software handles everything around it: the video reaches the player’s screen, the result is read off the cards, and every open bet is settled within seconds of the reveal.
Evolution reported EUR 443.0 million in live revenue for the third quarter of 2026. Growth Market Reports puts its 2025 share of the live dealer market (USD 3.23 billion) at about 62%, and that of the five largest studios, Evolution included, at about 84%.
On a live casino table, a card leaves the dealer’s hand and, in many studios, a camera reads its rank and suit using optical character recognition (OCR, software that identifies printed symbols in an image). The result goes to a game server that checks it against every open bet. Nobody types a number.
Inside the Studio
Studios resemble television sets more than casino floors. Each table carries several cameras and its own audio feed, and redundancy is the norm. Most studios keep a backup for the backup, because a feed that freezes on a Saturday night freezes for everyone watching. Behind the dealer works a crew most viewers never see, including camera operators, sound technicians, broadcast engineers watching stream statistics, shift managers and quality-assurance staff who check that what appears on screen is right.
Evolution ran about 2,000 live tables at the end of 2025, with presenters speaking 24 languages, and studios favor hosts who handle two or three of them. Some tables are streamed from the floors of land-based casinos, a format Evolution calls Dual Play.
The People at the Table
Studios want on-camera presence as well as card skills. Previous casino experience helps and shortens training, but they also hire people without it. They look for someone who can be the face of the game and is ready to relocate, and with studios concentrated in hubs such as Riga and Malta, what often means another city or country.
Recruits follow a standard program that sets a minimum level across blackjack, baccarat and roulette, then specialize by language or game. A dealer tied to one niche can struggle to switch, which is why cross-training helps.
A dealer works alone at the table with a camera for company, spared the rowdier tables of a land-based casino but watched closely by the players betting on every hand. The presenter follows a chat window and the clock, sticks to procedure and keeps calm when something breaks. Tips, a pillar of pay on casino floors, are generally discouraged online. Shifts run through nights and weekends, and one career guide describes most dealers as students, drawn by flexible hours.
What Gets Streamed
Baccarat leads the live tables at an estimated 30% of 2025 revenue, according to Growth Market Reports. Asian players, about 38% of Evolution’s revenue, bet mostly on baccarat and Dragon Tiger. The same report projects game shows growing fastest, at 11.3% a year through 2034, against 6.7% for baccarat.
Evolution’s 2025 revenue, live and automated games together, included EUR 793.7 million from Asia, EUR 729.8 million from Europe, EUR 296.7 million from North America and EUR 156.8 million from South America. Europe is slipping, down from EUR 779.0 million in 2024, and the company points to regulatory shifts and players moving to unlicensed sites. North America is projected to grow fastest, at 12.5% a year, as more US states and Alberta open regulated online casinos.
From Table to Phone, Step by Step
Technical guides break the delivery chain into five stages:
- Capture: cameras film the table from several angles.
- Recognition: OCR, card-edge barcodes or wheel sensors turn the physical result into data.
- Encoding: software compresses the video feed.
- Delivery: a content delivery network distributes the stream.
- Settlement: a game server matches the captured result against every open bet.
WebRTC, the protocol behind video calls, can hold delay below one second, while some industry guides put typical live casino streams between one and five seconds behind the studio. Timed betting windows exist partly to absorb that gap. Evolution reported that phones and tablets accounted for 77.0% of operators’ gaming revenue in the third quarter of 2026, up from 74.0% a year earlier, and cloud infrastructure carries the whole chain. It faces the strains described for high-traffic gaming platforms, from sudden surges of concurrent users to tight latency budgets and failover paths that must be tested before peak demand.
Why the Camera Carries the Trust
Fairness in a live game rests on physical randomness. A shuffled deck or a spinning wheel, with the recognition system only reporting what happened. World Casino News argues that watching a human deal “does more for confidence than any certification badge”. The same article adds that immersion can make spending harder to track, and says live lobbies now sit next to deposit limits, reality-check timers and self-exclusion tools.
What the Numbers Say About the Business
Evolution’s live revenue rose 2.6% year on year in the third quarter, to EUR 443.0 million, while its random-number-generator games, which are automated and need no studio, grew 10.1% to EUR 83.1 million. “For the first time since 2024, all regions reported quarter-on-quarter growth,” chief executive Martin Carlesund said, adding that the group also grew year-on-year.
Growth Market Reports estimates that Evolution earned about EUR 0.89 million of live revenue per table in 2025, against a build cost near USD 150,000 per table, and notes that studios need scale to be profitable. Evolution itself describes barriers to entry as relatively low and barriers to success as considerably higher.
Gambling is for adults aged 18 and over and is best treated as entertainment, not income. Set limits for time and money before taking a seat at any table, live or automated. In the UK, GamCare’s National Gambling Helpline offers free, confidential support on 0808 8020 133.
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