You’ve placed your chips. The dealer waves their hand over the layout. “No more bets.” The ball is spinning, the wheel is turning, and then—nothing. Your screen freezes. Three seconds pass. Five. When the image returns, there’s a pile of chips being pushed toward another player’s position. Did you win? Did you lose? What actually happened while your connection stuttered?
This scenario plays out thousands of times daily across live dealer platforms worldwide. And what happens in those frozen moments is far more interesting—and more carefully engineered—than most players realise.
The Distance Problem
Let’s start with geography. If you’re playing from Manchester and connecting to a studio in Riga, Latvia—where Evolution Gaming operates one of its largest facilities—your video signal is travelling roughly 1,800 kilometres. At the speed of light through fibre optic cable, that’s about 9 milliseconds one way. Sounds fast, right?
But that 9ms is just the theoretical minimum. Your data doesn’t travel in a straight line. It hops through routers, gets processed by your ISP, passes through international exchange points, and arrives at the studio’s content delivery network before finally reaching the actual game server. Realistically, you’re looking at 40-80ms of base latency before anything else gets factored in.
Now add video encoding. The studio captures footage at high resolution, compresses it in real-time using H.264 or increasingly H.265 codecs, chunks it into segments, and pushes it out. That encoding process alone adds 100-300ms depending on the quality settings and hardware. Your device then needs to decode and render the video—another 50-100ms on most systems.
Add it all up and you’re watching something that happened 200-500ms ago. Half a second doesn’t sound like much, but when a roulette spin takes about 20 seconds from release to result, that delay represents a meaningful chunk of the action.
Two Clocks, One Game
Here’s where it gets clever. Live dealer platforms don’t operate on a single timeline. They run two separate clocks: the studio clock and the player clock.
The studio clock is the source of truth. It’s a precise, server-side timestamp that marks every event: when betting opens, when it closes, when the ball is released, when the result is determined. This clock is synchronised across the studio infrastructure using NTP (Network Time Protocol) or more precise alternatives like PTP, typically accurate to within a few milliseconds.
The player clock is what you experience. It’s offset from the studio clock by your specific latency, which the platform continuously measures. When the studio clock says “betting closes in 5 seconds,” your interface might show 4.7 seconds because the platform knows your stream is running 300ms behind.
This dual-clock system is why bet placement works at all. When you click to place a chip, your action isn’t evaluated against what you’re seeing—it’s timestamped and compared to the studio clock. If your bet reaches the server before the studio’s “no more bets” moment, it counts. If it arrives after, it’s rejected, regardless of what your screen was showing at the time.
What Actually Happens When Your Stream Drops
Now we get to the interesting part. Your connection hiccups. Maybe your WiFi drops for two seconds, maybe your ISP routes you through a congested node, maybe someone in your house starts a Netflix stream. What happens to your game?
Scenario 1: Lag During Betting
If your stream freezes while betting is still open, your pending bets are the immediate concern. Most platforms handle this gracefully—any bet you’ve already placed is stored server-side, not on your device. It’s confirmed. It’s happening. Your frozen screen changes nothing.
But if you’re mid-click when the freeze happens, things get murkier. Your bet request might be in transit, sitting in a buffer somewhere between your device and the game server. The platform doesn’t know if you intended to bet or not. When connectivity resumes, that request finally arrives—but by then, betting might be closed. Result: rejected bet, no loss, no gain, probably some frustration.
Scenario 2: Lag During the Spin
This is the most common anxiety-inducing situation. You’ve bet, betting is closed, the ball is in motion, and your stream dies. What happens?
Absolutely nothing changes about your bet. The spin continues in the studio regardless of your connection status. The result is determined, recorded, and settled against your confirmed wagers. When your stream recovers, you’ll see the outcome—whether that’s immediately, in the game history, or after a page refresh.
What might happen is that you miss the visual. The ball could land, the dealer could announce the number, chips could be collected or paid, and your screen might still be frozen or showing a buffering animation. When it recovers, you might see the tail end of the payout or even the start of the next round. Your account balance, however, will reflect the correct outcome.
Scenario 3: Complete Disconnection
What if your internet dies entirely mid-spin and doesn’t come back for five minutes? Same principle applies, but with an extra layer. Your bets are settled normally. If you won, the winnings are credited. If you lost, the stake is deducted. You can verify this by logging back in and checking your transaction history.
The game doesn’t wait for you. It can’t. There are other players at the table, and the entire model depends on continuous, uninterrupted operation. Your disconnection is your problem, not the game’s—a harsh reality that’s explicitly stated in every operator’s terms of service.
The Buffering Tricks
Platforms don’t just passively accept latency—they actively manage it through several techniques that most players never notice.
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
Your stream quality isn’t fixed. The platform monitors your connection in real-time and adjusts video quality accordingly. Strong connection? You get crisp 1080p footage. Connection wobbling? It drops to 720p or even lower to maintain continuity. You might notice a slight quality dip before you’d notice a freeze.
This is why the same live table can look pristine on your home broadband and grainy on mobile data. The platform is making real-time judgments about what your connection can handle.
Buffer Depth Management
Every streaming platform maintains a buffer—a few seconds of pre-loaded video that smooths over momentary connection blips. For live dealer games, this buffer is typically smaller than entertainment streaming (Netflix might buffer 30+ seconds; a live casino aims for 2-4 seconds). Why? Because larger buffers mean more delay, and delay creates opportunities for abuse.
If a player could watch a 30-second delayed stream while placing bets against real-time data from another source, they’d have a massive advantage. Keeping buffers tight limits this exploit vector while still providing enough cushion to handle minor network variations.
Frame Dropping vs. Delay Accumulation
When your connection can’t keep up, the platform has two choices: drop frames to stay current, or play every frame and fall further behind. Most live dealer platforms choose frame dropping. You’ll see a slight stutter, maybe a jerky motion, but you’ll stay close to real-time. The alternative—smooth video that’s increasingly delayed—would make the betting interface feel disconnected from the action.
The Studio Side
Walk into a live dealer studio and you’d find a more sophisticated operation than most players imagine. These aren’t converted warehouses with a camera pointed at a table. They’re broadcast facilities with redundancy built into every system.
Multiple cameras capture each table—typically three to five angles that can be switched between or combined. Each camera feeds into an encoder. Each encoder has a backup. The encoded streams feed into distribution servers that push content to edge nodes around the world.
The result determination system is entirely separate from the video stream. Optical sensors or RFID chips track the ball position and wheel speed. When the ball settles, the winning number is captured directly from these sensors, not from video analysis. This separation is critical—it means video lag or corruption can never affect the actual game outcome.
In Evolution’s Riga facility alone, over 700 tables operate simultaneously during peak hours. Each table generates its own video stream, its own game events, its own bet processing. The infrastructure required to manage this—and to keep it all synchronised—represents a significant technical achievement that happens invisibly behind the glamour shots of dealers in evening wear.
When Things Go Wrong (On Their End)
Player-side connection issues are one thing. What about studio-side failures? These are rarer but more consequential.
If a camera fails mid-spin, the platform typically switches to a backup angle automatically. You might notice a sudden viewpoint change, but the game continues. If the primary encoder fails, streams get routed through backup hardware—again, possibly visible as a quality change or brief stutter, but nothing game-breaking.
The nightmare scenario is a failure in the result determination system. If the sensors malfunction or produce ambiguous data, the round is voided. All bets are returned. This is exceedingly rare—I’ve seen estimates suggesting it happens in fewer than 0.001% of rounds—but it does occur, and it’s the one situation where your bet can be unwound after placement.
Network failures at the studio are handled through geographic redundancy. Major providers maintain multiple studios across different countries, and can theoretically redirect traffic if an entire facility goes dark. In practice, this kind of failover has never been publicly documented for a complete studio outage—the individual table redundancy handles most issues before they cascade.
The Dispute Process
So your stream froze, you’re sure you placed a bet that should have won, and your balance doesn’t reflect it. What now?
The short answer: you’re probably not going to win this argument. Live dealer platforms maintain comprehensive logs of every bet placement, every server timestamp, every result determination. If their logs say your bet arrived after the cutoff, that’s almost certainly what happened. Your perception of timing, filtered through a delayed video stream, doesn’t constitute evidence. This is worth understanding before you start experimenting with different RouletteUK’s strategy page approaches—no betting system in the world can overcome a bet that didn’t register.
That said, legitimate disputes do exist. If a technical failure on the operator’s side caused your bet to be mishandled, you have recourse. The process typically involves raising a complaint with customer support, providing your player ID and the approximate time of the incident, and waiting while they review their internal logs.
For regulated operators, this review process is mandated by licensing conditions. The Malta Gaming Authority, UK Gambling Commission, and similar regulators require operators to maintain detailed game logs for exactly this purpose. If you’re playing on an unlicensed or loosely regulated site, your options become considerably more limited.
Protecting Yourself
Some practical steps to minimise latency-related frustration:
Use wired connections when possible. WiFi adds latency variability that Ethernet doesn’t. If you’re serious about live dealer play, a cable to your router removes one source of instability.
Close bandwidth-heavy applications. That Steam download or Dropbox sync running in the background? It’s competing with your game stream for bandwidth and can cause the kind of micro-interruptions that lead to missed bets.
Place bets early in the betting window. If you wait until the last second, any latency spike becomes a rejected bet. Placing chips with time to spare means your bet is confirmed before the close, regardless of subsequent connection issues.
Watch your transaction history, not just your balance. If a spin settles during a connection drop, your balance will update, but you might miss seeing it happen. The transaction log shows you exactly what was won or lost, even if the video didn’t.
Know where the studio is. Some operators let you choose between tables in different regions. A studio in Malta will have lower latency for European players than one in the Philippines. The closer the studio, the tighter the connection.
The Invisible Infrastructure
What makes live dealer roulette work is precisely what you don’t see: the latency calculations, the dual clocks, the result determination systems operating independently of the video you watch. The glamorous surface—attractive dealers, elegant studios, that satisfying clatter of the ball—sits atop engineering that’s deliberately invisible.
When your stream freezes, the system doesn’t break. It was designed with your connection problems in mind, separating what you see from what actually determines outcomes. Your experience might suffer, but the game’s integrity doesn’t.
Whether that’s reassuring or frustrating probably depends on whether you won or lost while your screen was frozen.
