The short version
- House edge is a percentage of what you wager. Cost per hour is that percentage times how fast you wager it.
- A software blackjack table can deal three to five times as many hands per hour as a live one.
- Identical rules, identical edge, and an hour that costs several times more — purely from speed.
Open a casino lobby and blackjack appears twice: once in the table games section, dealt by software, and once in the live dealer section, dealt by a person on camera.
Same rules, usually. Same basic strategy, certainly. Same house edge, assuming the pay tables match.
And a very different price per hour.
Edge is a rate, not a total
House edge is a percentage of the money you put through the game. It says nothing about time.
To get from edge to cost, you need one more number: how many decisions you make per hour.
cost per hour = house edge × stake × decisions per hour
That third term is where live and software tables separate, and it separates them by a lot.
The pace gap
A live dealer blackjack table with a full seat count deals somewhere around 40 to 70 hands an hour. There is shuffling, there are other players, there is a betting window, there is a human being physically moving cards.
A software blackjack table deals as fast as you can click. 200 to 400 hands an hour is normal, and an experienced player going quickly can exceed that.
Take a 0.5% edge and a €1 stake:
- Live table at 60 hands an hour: €0.30 an hour
- Software table at 250 hands an hour: €1.25 an hour
Same game. Same edge. Four times the cost, because you played it four times as fast.
A €50 bankroll lasts around 167 hours at live pace and around 40 hours at software pace.
This applies to every game
The pattern holds across the floor. Live roulette runs around 45 spins an hour; the software version will happily give you 120. Live baccarat deals roughly 70 hands an hour against several hundred for the RNG version.
Wherever a game exists in both forms, the live version is cheaper per hour for exactly this reason, and only for this reason.
The trade-offs, honestly stated
Live tables are not strictly better. They have real costs of their own:
Higher minimums. Live tables usually start at €0.50 to €5 a hand, where software tables often go down to €0.10. If the minimum forces you to bet five times as much, the pace advantage evaporates and then some. Check both numbers together, not one at a time.
Less control over pace. You play at the table's speed, not yours. Some people find that relaxing and some find it maddening.
Fewer rule variants. Software tables offer far more variation — single deck, surrender, different pay tables — and a better rule set can be worth more than a slower pace.
The takeaway worth keeping
If you find yourself surprised at how fast a balance moved on a software table, the explanation is almost never the game being unfair. It is that you played three hundred hands in an hour and did not notice.
The lever, if you want one, is not the game. It is the speed — and the easiest way to pull it is to sit at a table where somebody else is setting the tempo.
