Dead or Alive Saloon Stats, Results & Live Tracker

What is Dead or Alive Saloon by Evolution?

Dead or Alive Saloon is a live dealer card game from Evolution, released in November 2022 and inspired by NetEnt’s iconic Dead or Alive slot, a game that Evolution now owns after acquiring NetEnt a few years ago.

Now, what’s particularly intriguing about Dead or Alive Saloon is that it has virtually no precedent in the live online gambling world: a card-drawing guessing game that plays nothing like roulette, nothing like poker, and nothing like any table game you’ll have played before. That, for us, is its biggest strength and also its biggest weakness, so if you’re expecting a familiar live dealer game, this isn’t going to be for you.

In this Dead or Alive Saloon review, we’re going to break down exactly how it all works, look at how the game’s bonus functions, and tell you everything else you need to know about playing it.

Gameplay & Features

The entirety of the gameplay is designed around one core mechanic, and that’s predicting which of the 52 cards will be drawn first from a shuffled 104-card combined deck. The other 52 cards in that deck are bonus cards, and these are what give the game its volatility and its win potential. 

Now, every bonus card that’s drawn before the round-ending playing card adds something to the multiplier pot, which always begins at a minimum of 20x. The bonus deck breaks down as follows: there are 20 20x multiplier cards, 19 30x multiplier cards, 3 50x multiplier cards, 1 100x multiplier card, 3 Double cards, and 6 Bounty cards.

When a multiplier card is drawn, its value is simply added to the running pot, so, for example, a 30x card that’s drawn early would increase the pot from 20x up to 50x. If you drew another 30x card, the value of the pot would increase to 80x.

Double cards work slightly differently, as they double whatever is currently in the pot, but they don’t affect any future multipliers drawn after them. Bounty cards, on the other hand, trigger a short bonus, details of which we’ll cover in the following section.

Studio, Interface & User Experience

The studio for Dead or Alive Saloon is one of Evolution’s more impressive efforts, and you’ll see the set designed as a period-like Western saloon, complete with wooden bar furniture, warm lantern lighting, wanted posters on the walls, and dusty details throughout. The dealer wears a full Western costume, including a hat, holster, and even a waistcoat, and it actually doesn’t feel like a live casino game.

The card table itself is in the centre of the screen, and an overhead camera shows the action as each card is dealt. There’s a running display on screen that shows the current multiplier pot value, and this makes it pretty easy to track how the round is playing out.

When it comes to betting options, you’ll see all 52 cards laid out on the screen, and you can choose to bet on specific cards, entire rows, or entire columns. Like all Evolution titles, Dead or Alive Saloon is also fully mobile-optimised.

How to Play Dead or Alive Saloon Live

Dead or Alive Saloon is an easy game to pick up, and there’s very little to actually learn. Here’s how it works:

1. Place Your Bets:

At the start of each round, you have around 20 seconds of betting time. To do so, select your chip value and click the cards, suits, or values that you want to bet on.

2. Cards Are Dealt:

Once the betting round closes, the dealer begins drawing cards from the shuffled 104-card deck, turning each card face-up one at a time. If it’s a bonus card, it adds to the pot, and play continues. If it’s a standard playing card, the round ends.

3. Multipliers Stack:

Each multiplier bonus card drawn adds its value to the running pot, and the current total is displayed at all times, too.

4. Double Cards: 

If you draw a Double card, everything that’s currently in the pot is multiplied by 2x.

5. Round End:

As soon as a regular playing card is drawn, the round is over, and if you had an active bet on that specific card, you win the total accumulated multiplier applied to your stake. If you don’t have a stake on it, you lose your bet for that round.

Bounty Hunt Bonus

The Bounty Hunt is the one interactive feature in Dead or Alive Saloon, and it’s triggered whenever one of the six Bounty cards is drawn from the deck during a round. When it activates, the dealer takes a step back, and a wanted poster board appears on the screen, displaying three targets.

You then need to click to choose one of the three posters, and once you’ve made your selection, it opens, revealing a multiplier between 10x and 200x. That multiplier is then added to the current pot in the same way that a standard bonus card would be.

It’s also possible for multiple Bounty cards to be drawn in one round. and when this happens, the Bounty Hunt fires every time, staking its contribution to the pot on top of the previous one.

Payouts, Probabilities & RTP

There’s no traditional paytable for Dead or Alive Saloon in the way you’d find for roulette or baccarat, and that’s because payouts are determined entirely by how many bonus cards are drawn before the round ends.

The base payout for correctly predicting the winning card is always 20x. From there, every bonus card that gets drawn is added to that total, so final multipliers for each round can range from 20x up to 2,000x.

The overall RTP for Dead or Alive Saloon is 97.02%, and this stays the same regardless of which card (or cards) you bet on, because each of the 52 regular playing cards has an equal probability of being the round-ender. 

Streaming Quality

The production quality on Dead or Alive Saloon is in line with what Evolution offers in all of their games, and you’ll find the video stream is fully HD, with multiple camera angles showing you the action as the round progresses.

The audio is also pretty well-balanced, and we feel Evolution has done a good job with including just enough ambient noise to make things exciting but not so much that it ends up being overwhelming.

The game also runs smoothly on both desktop and mobile, and if you play from a mobile device, Evolution’s auto-quality-control-changer technology adjusts the stream quality in the background if your internet connection drops a bit to try and prevent lag/freezing.

Dead or Alive Saloon Stats Tracking

Dead or Alive Saloon displays a history of recent winning cards in the interface, but, as is standard in Evolution’s games, the history is limited to around the last 100 rounds, so while you can see which cards have been drawn most frequently and how often bonus cards have appeared before the round-ender, you can’t see much beyond this.

Here at CasinoTrackpot, we’ve developed our own tracking tool that follows Dead or Alive Saloon closely, and if you want to get a better idea for how the game’s played out historically, you can use our tool to gauge how the game’s been playing.

Now, of course, it’s worth pointing out that no statistics tracking tool in the world can help you to beat the casino game in the long run. What they can do, however, is give you a clearer picture of how the game plays out in reality. You can see, for example, the kind of volatility profile that tends to emerge, and this information can help you to get a better idea of how much you want to bet on every round and where to actually place your chips.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• It’s a very unique format, literally never-before-seen
• The multiplier stacking mechanic creates excitement as rounds progress
• Tons of betting options
• The bounty hunt pick is individual per player, so there’s a slight personal element 

Cons

• A very volatile live game
• The gameplay can feel quite slow compared to a lot of live dealer games on the market
• The Bounty Hunt, while fun, is basically the same as drawing any other multiplier card

Conclusion & Verdict

Dead or Alive Saloon is one of the more original concepts Evolution has released in a while, but it definitely isn’t for everyone, and to be honest, we’re not actually sure exactly who the game’s designed to appeal to.

On the one hand, it’s a positive that it’s something genuinely new; the format doesn’t really play like any existing casino game, but it does loosely borrow the roulette prediction-type mechanic. On the other hand, it feels so strange playing it that we can’t see it really becoming that popular.

Like it or not, the majority of software providers continue to re-release new versions of old games because players like them. Most studios avoid attempting entirely new concepts most of the time, and while we always like to see innovation, Dead or Alive Saloon just feels a bit… out of place.

It’s also pretty volatile; in rounds where bonus cards don’t come often, the 20x base payout is low, especially if you’ve spread your bets across lots of cards. It also isn’t likely to appeal to players who enjoy the fast pace of Evolution’s wheel-based titles like Funky Time and MONOPOLY Live, but if you’re willing to endure the variance and don’t mind playing something totally unique, it’s not the worst game we’ve ever seen.