Casino games in Ireland: what sits under the slots
Open a partner lobby on a phone and the first three screens are slots. Roulette, blackjack and baccarat sit under a second tab, usually marked “Table Games” or “Live Casino”, and that tab is where the arithmetic actually favours the player. A slot’s return to player is set by the studio and rarely published above 96%; blackjack played correctly returns over 99%.
That gap is the entire reason this page exists. Casino games, in the narrow sense used here, means the table games and their electronic and live equivalents: roulette, blackjack, baccarat, craps, sic bo, poker variants and video poker, plus bingo, which behaves differently enough from all of them that it gets its own explanation below. The real money casino page covers the wider lobby, slots included; this one stays with the games that have rules worth learning.
The nine partners ranked above do not carry the same slice of that menu. A brand can advertise thousands of slots and still run a thin table-games section, and the only way to know is to check the specific game, which is what the rest of this page and the four pages linked from it are for.
The house edge, game by game
House edge is the one number that survives contact with any casino’s marketing copy, because it is a property of the payout table rather than a claim the operator makes. The figures below are the standard results for the stated rules; a table with different payouts or an extra pocket on the wheel changes them.
| Game | House edge | What changes it |
|---|---|---|
| Blackjack, basic strategy | ≈0.5% | Rises sharply on a 6:5 blackjack payout instead of the standard 3:2 |
| European roulette | 2.70% | Single zero |
| French roulette with la partage | 1.35% | Only on even-money bets (red/black, odd/even, high/low) |
| American roulette | 5.26% | Double zero |
| Baccarat, banker bet | 1.06% | 5% commission on winning banker bets |
| Baccarat, player bet | 1.24% | No commission |
| Baccarat, tie bet | 14.36% | Paid at 8:1 despite the name suggesting a coin flip |
| Craps, pass line | 1.41% | Improves with odds bets behind it |
| Sic bo, small/big | 2.78% | Worse on the specific-triple and single-number bets |
| Video poker, Jacks or Better (full pay) | 0.46% | Full-pay tables are rare; a short paytable can double this |
| Bingo | not applicable | Prize pool split, not a fixed edge |
| Twenty-Five | not applicable | Not house-banked; players play each other |
Roulette and craps ask nothing of the player beyond choosing where to put chips. Blackjack, video poker and Texas Hold’em ask for a decision on every hand, and the edge above only applies if that decision is the correct one.
Four games, four full pages
Roulette gets the deepest treatment on this site, because the difference between a single zero and a double zero on the wheel is the single biggest edge swing available at any table game. The online roulette guide covers European, American and French wheels, explains where la partage actually protects a bet, and walks through the bet types on the layout.
Blackjack’s edge is also the easiest for a careless player to wreck without noticing. The online blackjack page spends a good part of its length on the 6:5 payout trap, because a table that looks identical to a standard one at a glance can be paying out at a meaningfully worse rate.
Baccarat keeps getting recommended for its tie bet by casinos that profit handsomely from it, so the online baccarat page opens with exactly how bad that bet is and works through the drawing rules that decide every hand instead.
Bingo is the odd one out on this list. No wheel, no dealt hand, no fixed house edge, and a format, ninety-ball, that most other guides on this site never mention. The online bingo page covers what changed when the format moved online and, honestly, which of the nine partners actually run a bingo room at all.
Dice and wheel games beyond roulette
Craps has a reputation for complexity that the layout does nothing to dispel, but the core bet, the pass line, carries a 1.41% house edge and needs no more than a single decision before the dice are rolled. The craps trainer covers the pass line, the odds bet stacked behind it, which is the only bet at a casino with no house edge at all, and the place bets scattered around the rest of the table that are mostly best avoided.
Sic bo runs on three dice instead of a wheel or a pair, and its small and big bets sit at a 2.78% house edge, respectable enough, while its single-number and specific-triple bets run into double digits. The sic bo guide lays out the full payout table, because sic bo is one of the few games where the bet names alone give no hint of how bad some of the options are.
Poker, video poker and Ireland’s own card game
Texas Hold’em at a casino is not really a casino game in the house-edge sense, because the house takes a rake rather than banking the hand, and the outcome depends on the other players at the table rather than on a fixed payout table. The Texas Hold’em trainer covers hand rankings, position and pot odds, the actual skills that separate a winning player from a losing one.
Video poker looks like a slot and plays like blackjack. Jacks or Better on a full-pay table returns 0.46% to the house with correct strategy, one of the best figures on this entire page, but the paytable printed on the machine decides that number, and a shortened paytable can double the edge without changing how the game looks. The video poker guide explains which numbers on the paytable to check before the first coin goes in.
Twenty-Five belongs to nobody but Ireland. It is a trick-taking game built around a trump order that puts the five of trumps above the ace of trumps, played in pubs and at kitchen tables rather than casinos, and it has no house bank because there is no house: players play each other. It earns a place in the Twenty-Five rules page mostly because it is the one card game most Irish readers already half know, and half-knowing the rules of Twenty-Five is a very Irish state to be in.
Live versus RNG: the same name, two different products
Roulette, blackjack and baccarat all exist in two forms on a modern lobby: an RNG version that resolves instantly against a certified random number generator, and a live version streamed from a studio with a real wheel or a real shoe of cards. The house edge on the classic tables barely moves between the two. What moves is everything around the game: live tables run to the studio’s schedule rather than on demand, and bonus wagering treats them very differently, often weighting live blackjack and live roulette at a fraction of their RNG equivalent, or at nothing at all.
The live casino page covers which studios supply which partners and what those wagering weightings actually are; there is no need to repeat that arithmetic here beyond the general point that a player planning to use a welcome bonus and a player planning to sit at a live table are, in practice, planning two different sessions.
Choosing a casino by its catalogue, not its bonus
A welcome bonus is the same shape everywhere: a match on the first deposit, a wagering requirement, an expiry date. The game catalogue underneath it is not, and it matters more to how a session actually goes. Nomini’s comparison entry lists 104 game providers, the largest of the nine partners, which is a reasonable proxy for depth across roulette, blackjack and baccarat variants alike, though it says nothing about any one specific table until the lobby is opened. JackpotCity is the one partner confirmed to run a dedicated online bingo room, checked directly on its site in September 2026, which matters a great deal if bingo is the actual reason for visiting and not at all if it isn’t.
The how we rate page explains the method behind the ranking above in full, and it weighs catalogue depth alongside licensing and payout speed rather than treating the bonus as the whole story. A player who reads the bonus terms and skips the game list is checking half the page.
The €10 stake and €3,000 win cap written into the Gambling Regulation Act 2024 does not apply to any table on any of the nine partner sites today, because none of them yet holds an Irish remote-gaming licence; that category is still expected to open for applications in 2027. Which games end up defined as “certain casino-style games” under that cap, and whether a blackjack hand or a roulette spin counts, is a detail the Act leaves for the regulations that follow it.