Open a casino lobby and the same game appears twice: once as software and once with a person dealing it on camera. They are marketed as the same product with a different presentation. Structurally they are not. Below, the six components of a round, with what each one is made of on either side.
The source of randomness
Where the outcome comes from.
A certified random number generator, tested by an independent laboratory before the game goes live and periodically thereafter.
Physical apparatus. A shoe of cards, a wheel, a set of dice, observed by cameras and read by optical recognition.
The pace of a round
How many decisions per hour the format allows.
Set by you. As fast as you can press the button, and autoplay removes even that limit.
Set by the table. A dealer, other players, and a fixed betting window. Structurally slower, and that is the single largest practical difference between the two.
Minimum stake
The floor on a bet.
Typically very low, because the marginal cost of a round is close to zero.
Higher, because a staffed table has a real hourly cost that has to be covered.
Where the house edge sits
How the operator's margin is expressed.
In the paytable and the RTP figure, published per game.
In the rules of the table itself: the number of zeroes on the wheel, whether the dealer stands on soft seventeen, the commission on a banker bet. Read the rules, not a percentage.
What you can verify
The audit trail available to a player.
A certification statement and a published return figure. You are trusting a testing house.
The video. You are trusting your own eyes plus the studio's procedures, which is a different kind of assurance rather than a stronger one.
Who actually built it
The studio behind the table.
A slot or table-game developer, usually named in the game's info panel.
A live-casino specialist running physical studios. The largest of them publishes its studio footprint and product range on its corporate site, which is a useful sanity check on which brands are genuinely running what.
Which one to pick
Not on the grounds most people use. The relevant difference is not authenticity or atmosphere, it is throughput: a live table imposes a rhythm on you and a software table does not. If the thing you want from an evening is a slower one, that is a real and underrated argument for live, and it has nothing to do with the maths.
If you want the two formats compared on the numbers rather than the feel, GambleDragon has a side-by-side of house edge and pace across both, and a profile of the studio that operates most of the live tables you will encounter.
Sources
- Evolution — corporate site, studio and product information, evolution.com (accessed 1 August 2026)
- No per-game return figures are quoted here; those are published by each game's developer and vary by configuration.
18+ — Gambling can be addictive. Please play responsibly.