Casinos on the Net

The internet has added a new twist to gambling. You can now play casino games online. There are three types of online casino games. For fun, legitimate gambling, and Illegitimate gambling.

For fun sites tend to have more than just casino games. The purpose of these sites is to provide games for people to play. Casino games are just one type of game, but they tend to be well known and popular so lots of fun gaming sites have them. My personal recommendation is BlazingGames.com because it is my site. A variation on the fun site are prize sites. These sites give away prizes to players. The prizes are paid for by advertising. The concept is that people want to win prizes, so they play on the site in order to earn lots of points to enter into draws. Because they are spending lots of time on the site, the increased advertising revenue covers the cost of the prizes. Having done some consulting work for this type of site, I know that at least some of these sites do actually give away real prizes. I also know that you should not expect to win a prize as there is a HUGE number of entries for every draw!

Legitimate gambling sites are sites that are legally licensed. Legal, that is, in the jurisdiction that they are licensed. The specific rules and regulations for a casino may be different than what they are in the country you are in. In fact, it may technically be illegal for you to gamble online depending on where exactly you live. These sites let you gamble using real money any time you want to play. If you are a gambling addict this can be a really bad thing!

Illegitimate sites look just like legitimate sites. They let you use real money to gamble. The big difference here is that they are not legally licensed in any country. Such sites may actually work just like a legitimate site, but more likely they are fraudulent. How? In the off chance that you are lucky and win money, they may not actually pay you though will gladly take your money when you loose. Likewise, the games themselves may be rigged. Licensed casinos usually have rules about cards and dice simulating real world probability. Illegitimate casinos don’t have to worry about this and can rig the games to give themselves an even larger profit margin than the profit margin they normally have.

How can illegitimate casinos rig games? They write the software that you are using to play the games. As such they can make the games work any way they want. The easiest way to cheat is to reduce or eliminate the highest paying hands while still keeping the hands in the payout charts. As the highest paying hands are rare so no body is going to notice this. In video poker, the best hand tends to be a royal flush. All that has to be done is scan the hand being sent to the player. If it is a royal flush, re-deal the hand. If the draw cards will result in a royal flush, draw new cards. All this happens behind the scenes so the player will never know that the cards he received were not the cards he was originally going to get. The casino, however, just saved a lot of money.

Blackjack can be done in a similar way by reducing the number of blackjacks the player receives. You can’t eliminate the blackjacks completely as that would be too obvious. What you can do is reduce the number of blackjacks by looking at the cards to be dealt to the player. If the cards would result in a blackjack, you generate a number randomly. If that number is odd, you let the player have the blackjack. If even, then you deal a new hand for the player. This simple change would result in 50% less blackjacks for a player. The player, again, only sees the final cards that are dealt to her. She doesn’t realize that the 16 she was just dealt was originally a blackjack.

If you are going to gamble on line for real money, you may already have a gambling problem. If you are sure that you do not have a gambling problem, make sure that it is legal to do so where you live. Likewise, take a careful look at the site you are going to be gambling at. Find out if they are legitimate and if so what the laws that govern their games are. My personal suggestion is to not play for money but to instead go to BlazingGames.com and play the games there.