Online Casinos Blog

Do you know how to use your gambling smarts?  Now smart gambling isn’t just following good gambling strategy, though that can be a part of it.  Gambling smarts start before you walk into (or log onto) that casino and continue even after you stop playing.  They encompass everything from casino and game choice to personal safety.  No one can every guarantee that you will win during every visit to the casino, but you need to be smart during every visit.

Before the casino visit you need to determine your bankroll and budget. How much can you spend? If you’re visiting a live casino, like a Las Vegas casino, you’ll need to budget for accommodations, food and travel as well as gambling. Don’t leave any part of the budget up to chance and don’t depend on comps to pay for the room or food, even if you’ve been told they will. Long time gamblers know that if they don’t spend time in the casino, those comps can vanish.  If you’re gambling online or in a live casino, you need to decide what your bankroll is and stick to it! If you gamble online don’t be tempted by casino bonus offers to deposit more than you should. Take a smaller bonus if it keeps you on budget.

Play the games you enjoy and a betting range that is comfortable for you.  Yes, blackjack has better odds the slots, but is it really smart to spend a short amount of time betting $5 a hand at the blackjack table when what you really want to do is play the nickel slots?  Gambling is a form of entertainment and you have the right to entertain yourself with the games that you enjoy. But keep an eye on the bankroll. You also have the responsibility not to visit the ATM and blow your mortgage payment so you can play some more.  I recommend taking breaks now and then, especially when you’re losing. At a casino, you can walk around and visit the shops or spend some time at the pool. At home, you can cook or get outside and play with the kids. The breaks will actually make gambling more enjoyable.

Afterwards, keep your personal safety in mind.  At a live casino this may mean tipping a security guard to escort you to your car. Always use valet parking so you aren’t alone in a parking garage. And it’s a good idea to use the restroom with friends. Guys, get over it. The men’s room is a popular spot for robberies because men don’t go in groups.  If you gamble online, don’t brag about your winnings on gambling forums. This may just be a red flag to a hacker that your account at a casino is worth hacking into.  Feel free to chat about your favorite games or favorite casinos, but keep the celebrations a bit more private.

See, those are all gambling smarts. They won’t guarantee a win, but they will let you have fun while playing safely.

Do you play at Bodog Poker? Well, if you do and you’re a US player, there’s bad news waiting for you. Actually, even if you don’t have an account, it’s bad news because the US is losing a casino that is considered by many to be a best online casino.

The news? The Bodog brand, including the online casino and the poker room, are leaving the US market. Perhaps not for good, but at least until we get our gambling act together. And we can blame it on the Brits.  It’s their fault for being so sensible. This time their stiff upper lip is getting all down on our business.

See, Bodog wanted a UK license so that they could focus expansion into two top markets  – the UK/EU market and the Asian market. Now, Asia wasn’t a problem as far as the US scene is concerned, but the UK Gambling Commission expressed a little concern about Bodog’s business in the US. The UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Act) has the UK a tad worried so they’d rather not see it violated. But Bodog’s contract with Morris Mohawk Gaming comes to an end this December. So they made the decision to pull out of the US if they got the UK license. They did. They will.

Now the folks at Morris Mohawk have come out with their own news. Since establishing their own gambling brand will no longer put them in unfair competition with a company they do business with, they’re going to launch their own gambling experience.  US players with Bodog will be invited to join the new Morris Mohawk brand and continue playing.  That or move to the UK to keep playing on Bodog. Changing casinos seems a bit less drastic than changing continents.

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It seems a week doesn’t go by without news from the online gambling front and I’m wondering of the face of online gambling is changing  in the US. Oh, we won’t see CNN News discussing the changes with the same enthusiasm they show to discussing the upcoming presidential elections, but the news is out there in other places.  Here’s some of what I’m seeing.

There’s the big news that bwin.party is teaming up with both MGM Resorts International and Boyd Gaming to form an even bigger online gambling company. This was a move that many suspect was designed to give them an in to the online gambling market in the US, if it ever opened up to legislating online gambling.

Not likely to happen, you say?  Well, Nevada has now announced that they’ll be issuing the first online poker licenses in February. Now they’ve also let it be known that casinos already established in the state of Nevada. So, wait – MGM International has casinos in Las Vegas. So, does this mean that bwin.party just negotiated a cool potential license to offer online poker in the US? Couple Party Poker be back folks?

Well, maybe. But don’t expect to start playing at home. See the government, any government, seems to have a difference concept of online gambling than people who understand what online means. It looks like Nevada’s licenses will allow existing Nevada casinos to offer online gambling at existing gambling establishments, like casinos. So, umm, you’ll be able to go to Nevada and gamble online in a casino! Umm….

Well, it’s nice to know the marriage / publicity stunt / TV episode or whatever those handful of days when Kim Kardashian was married to Kris Humphries are called is paying off for some folks.  It seems that Betonline.com was taking bets on the divorce before the 10 million dollar wedding event and television spectacular (marriage is a sacred and these days televised institution judged by the TV ratings) took place. One bet, which had almost even odds was whether the marriage would break up before the NBA regular season took off. A sarcastic seeming bet that apparently put more faith in the marriage than it should have.

Ah, the joy of pseudo-celebrity marriage.  The question now is will the Kardashian brand withstand any backlash from the divorce and I’ve even seen quotes that say things like “Kim has this knack for turning bad moment in her life into financial bonanzas.”  So, if you bet on the Kardashian’s breaking up, don’t feel too sorry for Kim because hey, her marriage may have ended but her fame will go on…  Or as Khloe Kardashian said “Love is everything…” You know, except when it needs to hold your marriage together for longer than the 90 employment trial period the average McDonald’s fry guy gets.

I’d love to bet on when the American public will finally tire of the Kardashians and other folks apparently famous for being famous. Hey, she didn’t make the NY Times today, which could be a good sign.  Hey, if someone fusses at you for spending time gambling online, ask them if they watch the Kardashian wedding. Then ask which they think is a bigger waste of time.

Can you believe what the media reports about gambling? Probably not. There are a couple of problems here. First some media like http://www.foxnews.com/   are supporting a conservative agenda that really just doesn’t fit in with the idea of gambling.  But really the bigger problem stems from the whole concept of “news.”  See, news isn’t something that happens when everything is going well.  That millions of people visit gambling sites every day and nothing terrible happens isn’t newsworthy. We wouldn’t all tune into the news if it was just a list of things that were going right in the world.  News only happens when something changes and usually when something goes wrong.

Which is why the news about online poker lately has been about the problems over at Full Tilt Poker. The irony of the situation is that most of the major news media didn’t even pick up on a problem the online poker world had been following for months until someone in Washington DC used the word Ponzi scheme in connection with the online poker room. It isn’t an entirely accurate accusation but it gave the news something to focus on — see online gambling is bad. This site was running a Ponzi scheme.

Now, in fairness, the problem wasn’t a Ponzi scheme but it really was the victim of terribly bad management.  The sort of money management normally reserved for Wall Street. The site had mingled player funds with operating funds, which worked fine as long as business was brisk. But when the US operations were unexpectedly shut down and the site left owing US players about 150 million dollars, the money just wasn’t there. And then they had trouble paying other players.  The end result was that they lost their license, which was the proper thing to happen. Players are still owed money and Full Tilt will need to pay that out to get their license back. Not a good day in the poker world for lots of people. Which is why it was news.

I want to talk about something I see on gaming sites a lot – strategy versus a system. Now, to me the difference is simple, but that’s because I have my own definitions for the two. For me a gambling strategy is one that helps me play better and may influence the odds in my favor. A gambling system is a load of bull crap that promises to tilt the universe in my favor and ensure that I can win thousands or even millions at a particular game.

The critical point here is determining the difference between the two. For example, blackjack has a playing strategy that’s based on the card deck and the mathematical probability of going over 21 based on what’s in front of you. Video Poker games have strategies based on trying to land the royal flush while keep winning hands in a 52 card deck. Following these strategies increase your odds of winning. But they don’t promise that you’ll break the bank and hit the news as the next gambling millionaire.

Systems usually promise that. Okay, they don’t promise you front page of the NYtimes, but they tend to guarantee that you can’t lose using their method. And that you’ll make a fortune.  And if you look at something like Roulette systems, you’ll find that the folks offering them usually want you to pay money for their fool proof system.

There’s a reason for this. The best way to make money using a gambling system is to get the fools to pay for it.  Think about it. If I had a sure-fire gambling system for roulette that guaranteed I’d win thousands whenever I visited the casino, know where I’d be? At the casino winning money!  I’m not going to kind-heartedly offer it to you for a small payment of $29.95. Heck no, I’m keeping that a secret and winning as much as I can.

So, just think of the old adage – if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t. Systems always sound too good to be true. Strategy often just sounds like lots of work and memorization to better learn the game.

One of the question people have about playing at an online casino is – just how do the games at online casinos work?  Now, people don’t seem to wonder this as much with slots, which work by computers these days at casinos as well as on the web.  It’s card games and games like roulette that usually bring up the question.  But actually, they share a lot with slot games when it comes to online casinos.

Now, an online casino is offering virtual games with simulated play on a computer so they won’t have a dealer behind the scenes dealing cards for blackjack or actually spinning the wheel when you sit down to play roulette. (Well, most won’t. There are a few European casinos that do offer real-dealer play. Some even have an option for a player to take a virtual seat at a real world casino and play with the players visiting the casino. But there are usually some restrictions and time limits to playing that way.)

So, how do the games work? You might think, well, the casino could just develop a program where a certain number relates to a certain card and then use those to represent cards on the screen. And in essence that’s what they do.  But the trick isn’t just in creating the cards, but in dealing them. A computer program can’t shuffle a real deck of cards, so a process has to be developed to virtually shuffle a deck or spin a roulette wheel. That program is a RNG or Random Number Generator.  What it does is randomly generate a series of numbers for any game.

So a series of five numbers would be a video poker hand.  In black jack when you hit deal, the RNG generates another random number that determines the card you’re dealt.  Another series of number represents the roulette wheel.  As a player, you won’t notice much difference between these RNG games and games using real cards or wheels. Though there are some exceptions. Card counting doesn’t work in online blackjack because there are no real decks to count the cards in.  This doesn’t change the games fairness, but if you want to try out that cool card counting strategy you heard about, you’ll need to go to a real world casino.

Ask a expert gamblers about the best games in the casino and he may just tell you that blackjack is the best game you can play. Now, this is because a skilled player has probably practiced his blackjack strategy and knows just when to stand and when to hit to try to beat the dealer. But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for a novice player at the blackjack tables, particularly the online blackjack tables.

I’ll tell you one of the top reasons I enjoy playing at online casinos rather than land based casinos.  At a land based casino, I have to sit down at the blackjack table with a bunch of other players, all working under their own agendas. The guy on one side of me is going to be pissed if anyone plays too slowly and takes too long thinking over their strategy. The guy on the other side is the player who plays too slowly. And someone will get upset because they think someone else made a bad call and stole the winning card they should have gotten.

When I play blackjack online none of that happens. It’s me and the cards and a zen sort of feeling with working through strategy.  For a new player, online blackjack is the best place to learn and practice strategy. Nearly every online casino will let you play in practice mode without risking any real money and then switch to playing blackjack for real money when you feel secure enough to win at the games. So check out online blackjack and learn the best game in the casino.

Are you a high roller? Over at Club USA Casino they have a high roller special starting tomorrow, September 15^th and running through Sunday, September 18^th.  Here’s what you have to do if you want to take advantage of this High Roller Bonus.  Now there are two separate bonuses.  The first is for slots, keno and scratch cards. To claim this bonus, you’ll have to deposit $150 dollars and use the coupon code CWC500X. This coupon code is available for a one time use and will get you a $500 bonus to play with. So, you’ll have $750 to play slots with, and you can play slots for a long time on that bonus money.

The other bonus is for players of blackjack, video poker and table games.  All you have to do is deposit $200 and you’ll get an extra $150 bonus money to play with. Just use the coupon code CWC150X and that coupon code is available for a one time use between September 15^th and September 18^th.

As always, you’ll want to check out the bonus terms and conditions before taking these bonus offers, even the high roller offers.  You’ll have to wager the slots offer through 45 times before you can cash out and the bonus offer for other games through 65 times before cash out.  Bonus offers can give you plenty of extra money to play with and a wise player always knows the terms before they take the offer.

Club USA Casino is the sister site of Club World Casino and is open to players from the United States. So if you like to play, check out Club USA.

I have one complaint about Aladdin’s Gold Casino. Now this complaint has nothing to do with the quality of the casino or the games or cashing out winnings — all of which might be a big warning sign. No, those are fine.  My complaint is that the excessively overdone Flash web site might make the casino one of the most visually attractive on the web, but it also makes finding the bonus info a pain in the rear.  So, I’m taking a moment to write a blog post to tell you that the casino has a great promotion starting tomorrow and you want to check this one out.  To find it on the casino, it’s under Weekly Promotions but you have to find the Next Promo button at the bottom of that screen to scroll to it or you’ll never know it’s there.  Which is a shame because this is worth looking into.

Now, the Aladdin’s Gold 500 promotion is a bonus promotion for the high rollers in the crowd. All you have to do is deposit $150 and you’ll get a $500 bonus to play slots on. Just use the coupon code 500GOLD. Now you can only use the coupon to claim this bonus one time between Thursday, September 8^th and Sunday September 11^th.  So, gather all your deposits for September and go for an extra $500 in playing money.  But remember this is just to play slots games and as always you want to check the terms and conditions before taking advantage of any casino bonus.

If you don’t feel up to the Aladdin’s Gold 500 promotion, the casino does offer an ongoing promotion for 65% on slots and keno using the coupon code SLOT65 or a 55% promotion for blackjack, video poker and table games using the coupon code OTHERGAMES55.

See you round the tables!