Hard Rock Bet Tests the Future of Omnichannel Gaming With Live Roulette

While not exactly revolutionary, Hard Rock Bet and their live gaming partner Playtech have launched a new dual-play experience that allows online players to bet on a live roulette game sitting right on the casino floor at Hard Rock Atlantic City. This is the exact same wheel that players are betting on in real-time inside the casino.

Appropriately dubbed Atlantic City Live Roulette, this game puts you as close as possible to the action while still letting you play from your couch and skip the toll roads down to the boardwalk. The sights, sounds, and excitement stay the same, but there is no smoke, no parking fees, and even better, no one elbowing you out of the way to get a late bet down on 36.

The game is available to any player throughout the Garden State on the Hard Rock Bet app, cementing its status as one of the premier NJ online casinos by joining more than 3,800 other table games and slots playable on your computer or mobile device. You can even earn Unity reward points while you wager from the backseat of a cab or while waiting at the doctor’s office.

These "omnichannel" games, which mix online betting with actual land-based tables, have proved increasingly popular and are already offered by Borgata and BetMGM. In June of last year, Caesars even launched Remote Reels at their Tropicana Casino; this feature uses real, physical slot machines encased in glass on the casino floor that can be played remotely at Caesars Palace Online Casino.

The theory is that online players miss the "live" slot experience and would prefer to play on actual physical machines rather than digital versions of hits like Huff and Even More Puff or Mo’ Mummy Mighty Pyramid. So far, the 25 machines have proved exceedingly popular, ironically with many people swinging by the casino just to watch a slot machine behind glass that they could have played while stuck in traffic on the I-95.

Other games with rules suitable for online play, like Baccarat and Craps, are likely not far behind. Baccarat uses community cards shared by everyone with no decisions made during the actual play of the hand, meaning thousands could bet on the same hand online with no disruption to the live game on the floor.

Craps similarly allows players to make different bets on the outcome of a single dice roll. Whether there are eight players at a live table at Ocean Casino Resort or a hundred people betting through an app on the next hot shooter, it wouldn’t fundamentally change the game mechanics. This would also allow casinos to offset the high labor costs of what has become an expensive game to operate.

While it’s difficult to predict exactly which games will arrive next, you can bet that the merger between land-based table games and online play will only accelerate over the coming year.