Once upon a time, there was a casino known as First Live – an operation which involved transmitting live video of dealers at a casino interacting with the player sitting at his computer.
Beset by a number of legal and financial problems, this operation soon bit the dust. But now, there’s another operation starting up, backed by the might of Asia’s most famous gambling tycoon – Stanley Ho.
Aptly titled www.drho.com, this new casino tries to recapture the spirit and feel of a live casino, again with live video of a dealer dealing the cards you are expected to play.
Targeted primarily at Asian – especially Cantonese – gamblers, a significant amount of effort has been expended in the hopes of creating a unique onlilne gaming environment for the gambling-mad Chinese.
But does it work?
Well, for starters, if you wish to download the software, it requires a MASSIVE 70 megabyte download – using a standard 56K dial-up modem, you can expect to spend anywhere from 5-8 HOURS downloading the software.
Granted, you can ask them to send you a CD,but if you’re like most gamblers, you want to gamble NOW.
Fortunately, I have a shared DSL line which allowed me to download the software in a little bit over an hour.
So I installed and tested it – and sadly, it appears that either my computer does not meet the minimum requirements (heck, I have a dual processor machine with a decent graphics card and 256MB of memory) or else the software is faulty, because I could not complete SINGLE hand of blackjack or anything else without constantly having to minimize and maximize the screen, even with all video and sound options set to absolute minimum.
Couple this with the massive bandwidth generally required for live video to be transmitted – even in the poor state that it was received – and you have a concept that simply CANNOT work until the worldwide fiber-optic installations are completed sometime next year.
Really sad, too, considering the might of the funding behind this Pengeluaran Sgp operation – Stanley Ho holds the monopoly on all casinos in Macau, the former Portuguese colony just an hour away from Hong Kong – and I suspect he will be mightily disappointed by the result.
I can’t justify a 70MB download for any reason – certainly not to gamble – and I wonder just what in the world was included with this software for the extremely poor results I got when I tried it.
Take a backseat, people. Go play somewhere where things work fast and efficiently.
Then sometime next year, when worldwide bandwidth increases and you have a dedicated connection by cable or DSL, go take another look. I don’t think they’re going to give up that easily, certainly knowing Dr. Ho’s reputation – and things can only get better in the future.
Just DON’T do it now. You’ll be glad you didn’t
