Fester’s Findings – January 2016
The year has only just begun and already we’ve seen the roll-out of several new tables and the prospect of new games on the horizon.
Baccarat new and squeezed at Evolution
Last year to coincide with the opening of William Hill’s Macau Baccarat Squeeze table Evolution Gaming announced plans to launch new baccarat tables in January. True to their word Evolution delivered on this commitment, although you needed to be at the right casino to find the 3 new tables (with and without card squeeze/peek) at launch.
As LD covered in his blog the tables have a distinct Asian flavour setting complete with bubbling water towers and card shufflers looking very attractive in special dresses for the opening. The flowing sound of water adds to the calming ambience of the room and is more welcome than some headache inducing ‘sound added’ tables out there (slots at William Hill Vegas being one of my bugbears).
The tables are presented in Evolution’s new wider UI. The UI looks much cleaner and modern. Unfortunately this does mean they are among the growing number of tables (Immersive tables, Caribbean Stud) that can’t be played in Multi-Game Play mode on PC. Personally, I’ve never wanted to play multiple tables at once, but it remains a popular feature for some players.
The new HD tables look great captured via multiple camera angles. Alternatively, this feature can be turned off if you prefer a larger permanent traditional HD view of the lovely dealers.
The only downside I’ve encountered at the Squeeze table here and in William Hill’s Macau area is the use of a card shoe with built in scanner. Failure to scan cards seems too frequent and is a source of delay while the dealer requests support. If you want a faster game of baccarat my advice would be try the other tables without the slower squeeze procedure or temperamental scanner.
By the end of January the new baccarat tables were available at notable Evolution casinos Unibet, William Hill, BetVictor, 888 & Mr Green.
William Hill Mayfair
Early January saw the latest development in William Hill’s long term strategy to completely overhaul their live tables and stay a country mile ahead of the opposition. This time it was the old dedicated area at Evolution that was consigned to history as a new Mayfair room became home to the majority of Hill’s private tables. No new net gain of tables but a very different looking room and layout.
The new Mayfair roulette table is a visually impressive Immersive Lite installation.
I’m not wholly convinced I like all the styling aspects of the new room. The beaded curtain around the Salle Privée blackjack table looks particularly out of place. But I do like the wide, side-on layout of the room and tables, rather than the looking down a long corridor of tables layout of the old William Hill private area.
The baccarat table is another of Evolution’s multi-camera next generation variety. But without the squeeze you get to see on Will Hill’s Macau table.
Thankfully the majority of William Hill’s friendly dedicated dealers survived the transition…although a few seemed to lose their way and ended up dealing on Evolution’s new generic baccarat tables and so on.
Besides the sheer number of private tables, one of the best aspects of William Hill is that there nearly always seems to be some promotion running or Promotion Host on hand with random bonus table visits.
Caribbean Stud Poker roll-out continues
More Evolution casinos have made the voyage of discovery and made landfall on the Caribbean Stud Poker island table. Players at 888,& Grosvenor Casinos can now experience the delights of the new poker table.
Meanwhile, I feel almost duty bound to award the Caribbean Stud Poker table my award for game of the month again. Well it would be ungrateful not to having being dealt FOUR OF A KIND on three separate occasions in January. A large amount of anticipation and excitement builds up as you are dealt an almost certain winning hand, but then the oh so agonising wait for the dealer cards to be revealed one-by-one hoping for a lower qualifying hand to maximise your winnings.
Players numbers at the table are routinely still only a handful but that should increase as the table is rolled out to more casinos.
Evolution Gaming had more reasons for poker loving players to rejoice in January with the announcement of their deal with Scientific Games to launch a live dealer version of Ultimate Texas Hold’em.
Double Ball Roulette
When they weren’t busy launching new baccarat tables or announcing new poker tables Evolution also had something up their sleeves for roulette players. Albeit not the biggest surprise ever in live dealer gaming history.
Evolution Gaming finally confirmed plans to launch Double Ball Roulette. From mid 2015 it was a fairly safe bet that at some point we would see the game make its debut at Evolution. The only real question was when and whether it would be a generic table, or solely for a private casino as PokerStars/Full Tilt had made the initial agreement with Games Marketing.
Dragonara Roulette spreads
Evolution’s land-based roulette table is becoming more available at casinos. The Dual Play Dragonara table streamed live from the casino in Malta is now playable at Unibet and Mr Green.
More choices at Mr Green
If you like the prospect of being able to play at several platforms, rather than your casino simply offering more of the same private tables you may want to give Mr Green casino a try.
They’ve just added the Extreme Live Gaming platform to their existing Evolution and Net Entertainment(NetEnt) tables.
Extreme’s new London studio was only established in 2015, but is already gaining some market traction. Admirers of the Extreme platform like what it has to offer in terms of interface, side bets, camera views(on blackjack) and so on.
Rival casino BetVictor still offer more live platforms (including Extreme’s), but it is a good solid mix of platforms now available from Mr Green.
For those occasions when you want to play at private tables you still have the option of Mr Green’s blackjack and roulette tables at Evolution. Or if baccarat is your game, sample the delights of the new generic tables at Evolution.
While you are logged in at Mr Green you may also want to check out the newest roulette table over at NetEnt…
Rock N’ Roulette
Net Entertainment’s latest themed table goes by the name of Rock N’ Roulette. Given the name you’d be right to expect a rock ‘n’ roll theme. As with their previous novelty roulette tables its the same old European roulette rules. Just presented slightly different.
This time you get a rock concert video backdrop and music track. Dealers also use the word “rock” wherever possible
As LD remarked,
Players must like this novelty-themed-table stuff
The table is playable at NetEnt casinos including Mr Green, Unibet & BetVictor.
Coral remove Hi-Lo
CORAL casino’s dedicated area at Playtech has gained an extra private blackjack table.
Although it came at the expense of the Coral Hi-Lo table which has been removed after a short life span. No real big loss to Coral players as the generic Hi-Lo table is still available, and so far that’s almost like having a private table given the limited number of Playtech casinos that have the table.
Coral’s newest blackjack table goes by the catchy name of Exclusive 10.
The 3 Coral blackjack tables each have a different minimum bet limit (5/10/20) which is great in principle. But as I’ve commentated on before, one of the most frustrating things I find at low limit tables is people betting way higher than the table minimum and then thinking it gives them the right to berate low betting players who have the ‘audacity’ to chat to the dealer or any players not following basic strategy.
Betting so much higher than other players doesn’t give high rollers the right to dictate what happens at the table. In my opinion if they truly want a more serious game of blackjack, rather than an opportunity to mouth-off they should make use of the higher limit tables. Or at the very least they ought to go back to first principles and learn basic strategy has the word basic in its name for a reason. It’s just a simple strategy based on the probability of what value of cards you are most likely to receive when you hit/split/stand as opposed to the dealer’s card. It’s crazy of players to think such a strategy could factor in all other player’s cards on the table and bad decisions by them not following basic strategy will impact on the laws of probability.
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