How to Find the Most Popular Casino Games Online

Slot machines are common place in casinos

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Online casinos abound on the Internet. Every casino seems to have an enticing offer to get you to spend your gambling dollars with them. So how do you choose? How do you find and play the most popular online casino games? There are several ways to approach your search, and all of them work.

Casino Website Portals

Casino website portals are great places to find the most popular games. Many of these portals will list the payout percentages and bonus amounts for casinos like the UK’s Bet 365 Casino, side-by-side with other casinos. You’ll see instantly which games and/or slots are the most popular.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are a great place to find out what games are hot and which casinos are offering the best incentives for players. Following your favorite casinos on social networks keeps you on the cutting edge of the gambling industry. In gambling, like everything else, knowledge is power.

Word of Mouth

Never under-estimate the opinions of friends and neighbors—whether they are real or virtual. Ask your friends what games they play and what their success rate is. Subscribe to your favorite online casinos’ newsletters and RSS feeds.  Pay attention to the games the big winners are playing.

Explore

Venture out into the online universe, using the recommendations for website portals, to explore new games and new casinos. No matter how popular a game is for others, it won’t necessarily be fun for you. Take advantage of the casino’s free play options to be sure that popular game is a good game for you.

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How To Cope With A Gambling Addiction

AZOV CITY, RUSSIA - JANUARY 30: People gamble... 

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If you or someone you love has a gambling addiction, you know that it is a very serious and difficult problem. Gambling can destroy financially secure families, ruin relationships and cause foreclosures. It’s not a petty concern.

In fact, an estimated 3 million people in America have a gambling problem. Gambling addiction, which is also called compulsive gambling, means that someone has no control over their gambling. They just have to do it.

Some problem gamblers are not fully addicted. In other words: they have some control. So, when you’re dealing with a problem gambler, the first thing to figure out is whether it’s a real addiction, or just a serious problem. Either way, you will want to seek help, but the path to treatment may be different.

There are a number of treatment options available, though not every method will work for every individual. Just like alcoholics, gamblers will need to figure out a solution that works for their specific needs.

One option is Gamblers Anonymous. This is a lot like Alcoholics Anonymous, and it’s a 12-step program. One of the key components of Gamblers Anonymous is the sponsor. Every gambler gets a sponsor to provide support, which may really help in times of desperation. This works well for gambling addiction.

Therapy is another option. Seeing a therapist and figure out what triggers the gambling problem can be helpful. A good therapist may help an problem gambler think about his or her issue in a new way, and begin to recover. While it’s not easy to solve a gambling problem, it’s possible with commitment and time.

 

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From Perfect Odds on Down at the Casino

What is a casino? Besides all the flashing lights, manufactured sense of excitement, plush seating, and sexy drink purveyors strolling about, trying to wet the clientele’s lips with a beverage, there is another view to be had of casinos. They’re mathematic machines, where each person is a tiny gear that helps the machine function. And each so-called gear has an innumerable amount of possibilities to their existence. This is the nature of odds making.

 

Odds inside a casino refer to the concept of one’s chance of winning a prize. Often, that prize is substantially larger than the bet, which is the easiest way to describe the appeal. By wagering a relatively tiny amount of money, each player is able to attempt to win. The most simple of odds is represented in the most simple of demonstrations: the coin toss. In a world where cheating and corruption make headlines, flipping a standard, two (differently) sided coin end over end multiple times on one throw yields a perfect 50/50 chance of winning and losing.

 

Perfect? Yes. Even if the coin flipper has spent years practicing to make their chosen side come up at will, this practice can be eliminated by disallowing the coin flipper to see which side is up before the flip. Between that, and allowing the opposing person to make the call on which side will land facing upwards, the coin toss represents fair, and even, odds. You won’t see much gambling centered around coin tosses. From that lofty perch, come the odds of all other casino games. They’re not as even, but they pay better to compensate for that fact.

 

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The Availability of Gambling

Atlantic City, New Jersey 2007

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Gambling laws are an oddball arena. States control whether or not gambling is allowed in their territory. And although a few states have legalized gambling, most have not. The situation got desperate enough in the past that entrepreneurs maximized the letter of the law and built their casinos on riverboats, since the law on water was different than on land. Over time, the laws were changed and adapted, so that on the popular Mississippi river for example, boats no longer needed to be operational boats with a captain and crew. Eventually, the law was modified in such a way to make even the appearance of water a strong enough case for a casino to exist. This led to ‘boats in moats,’ in which casinos were constructed on land and surrounded by water, rather than being on water.

 

There are a few places where the gambling still goes down with regularity though – such as Atlantic City and Las Vegas – where arcane rules don’t guide the construction of the gambling structures. These places became popular because a gambling demand exists, much as it always has, and people demonstrated that they were willing to travel to enjoy the experience.

 

And then everything changed. The Internet came of age, and virtually everybody suddenly found themselves online. And with the lack of regulation of the Internet, came online gambling options. Suddenly, gambling didn’t require travel. It didn’t require sexy waitresses pawning drinks off on patrons. It just required a computer and an online connection. And ‘poof,’ just like magic, the availability of gambling changed virtually overnight. It’s now available practically everywhere. No moat required.

 

 

 

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Evening out the Odds in a Casino

Most patrons of casinos are aware that the scene is about entertainment. In other words, people make bets as away to have a good time. Very few people truly believe that their involvement in card games, games of chance, or even games of skill will lead to their winning huge sums of cash. On the other hand, everyone has hopes that this happens when they visit the casino of their choice. But there is a difference in the two perceptions.

 

House advantage:

 

When it comes to odds, everyone has heard that the house has the advantage. And if that weren’t so, casinos would lose a disproportionate amount of the time, leading to losses, which means eventually no one would be able to gamble at a casino any longer. They’d all be out of business.

 

Evening out the odds:

 

Fortunately, the odds are not exactly stacked in a huge way against patrons in certain games, which explains part of the draw of the gambling scene. For example, the average roulette wheel has an equal number of black and red spaces. There are one, or two – depending on the style of the wheel – green spaces, which the house claims as theirs regardless of the patron’s bet. Since one is allowed to bet on color, it’s easy to calculate that the odds aren’t quite ‘stacked’ in the house’s favor. And with color bets paying out 2:1, the reward is incentivized.

 

Compare that to the massive 20+:1 payouts for betting on the right number on a roulette wheel. But hitting the right number on a particular has odds against it that are on par with the lottery.

 

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Want to Learn To Play Poker? Learn How To Bluff

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It was Abraham Lincoln who said something brilliant about fooling people. Well, in poker, it’s essential to be able to fool people. In fact, it would be great in this game to prove President Lincoln wrong and fool all of the other players…all the time.

What is a Bluff?

Generally speaking, a bluff is being able to trick the other players into thinking you have a better hand than you actually have. Bluffing in Texas Hold’Em will garner you greater rewards than in most other types of poker. You can secure greater rewards by playing on a site that offers a nice online casino bonus.

When is the Best Time?

Generally, the best time to bluff is when you think it will work, but here are a few situational tips:

  • When there are only a few players at the table
  • When your opponents are the types of players who fold easily
  • At the time when most players know they cannot win (on the river)
  • After everyone has checked
  • If you missed your bet on the pre-flop (this one is iffy so you need to know your opponents)
  • If you have the appropriate table image (meaning you just won a good hand the old fashioned way)

Of course, bluffing is always risky so it is imperative that even with these tips, you know against whom you are playing and have an idea of their risk tolerance and bet/fold tendencies. As with all gambling, never bet with money that you can’t afford to lose.

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Slot Machine Odds

Slot Machine

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Ever wondered what that billboard meant as you drove along the highway, you know, the one that read: ‘Loosest slots in the (fill in the blank) area?’ It’s a proclamation that seeks to explain that one’s chances of winning are higher at their establishment. A ‘loose slot’ plays on the old concept that a loose piece on a pinball machine would enable a player a distinct advantage. In theory, a loose slot also offers a distinct advantage.

 

In practice however, slots of the current and foreseeable era are programmed by a computer to offer up a random result every single time. There is no ‘sticking’ or otherwise that one can master to turn the game to their advantage. However, that doesn’t mean that a slot machine can’t be programmed to be looser than another. Sophisticated algorithms are involved in the making of a random slot machine. That’s why a particular machine is as likely to offer up back to back winning plays as it is to offer up wins separated by a thousand pulls of the slot handle.

 

Slot machines are a piece of equipment that offers up randomness. They don’t involve much beyond luck, as in how many players have sat in the chair before you, taking their chance to beat a program. Just remember that without knowing the precisely coded odds of a particular machine, it’s difficult to know just what your personal luck is up against. Since each ‘spinning wheel’ can hold a different number of possibilities, the odds of winning are 1: 32, 768 for a standard 32x32x32 combination of wheels. Odds go down when more than 32 spots are used.

 

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Few Gamblers are Addicts

A roulette wheel.

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A quick glance across the room at any casino might appear to reveal a room full of people suffering from a gambling addiction. But that’s simply not the case. For the employees who have landed jobs, that’s what the casino represents. They’re on the job to make an income. They are not hoping to hit any sort of jackpot, nor are they driven to the work by the allure of potentially striking it rich. For many, being a blackjack dealer or manning a roulette wheel is just a more interesting way to earn a living than many other professions. And of course, there is always the fairly large chance of meeting interesting, or even famous people while they work.

 

Aside from the employees, most casinos are also filled with large numbers of tourists. Whether they are from other cities from across the country, or the next town over, these tourists largely desire to soak in the exciting ambiance that casinos provide. With their flashing colors, neon lights, and seemingly perpetual motion, casinos offer an experience that rivals Disney World, without all the waiting in line and the intense heartbeats doled out to those who take their turn on the thrill rides.

 

Of the more frequent patrons, many have systems in place that they execute with religious fervor in an effort to beat the system and strike it big. From counting cards at the blackjack table to increase their odds of beating the dealer, to out-bluffing fellow players at the poker table, the better players do well for themselves. Those who actually have an uncontrollable gambling addiction are few and far between.

 

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Slot Machine Etiquette

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When heading to a casino to gamble, many people will choose a wide variety of different gambling opportunities. No matter what game a person prefers, however, there is an etiquette attached to that game.

Some like to gather around poker tables while others prefer a more solitary activity like pumping coins into slot machines. Even slot machines require a person to use good etiquette. Often players of slots enjoy putting money into two machines at the same time. However, if there is crowding in the casino, the polite thing to do is to limit one’s self to one machine. In addition, even if there are not many people playing, it is sometimes wise to stick to one machine because the machines have to be watched over as the player plays. Stories abound of players playing as many as six slot machines and then hitting the jackpot on one machine that is too far away and people scoop up a few coins as they pass by. This is not as rare an occurence as some might think.

Another rule of etiquette is in how machines are saved. If a machine has a chair tipped against it, or the chair in front of a machine has a coat or another personal item draped over it, then this machine is being saved for someone else. It is best to pass by these machines and look for a machine a few rows away or a few machines away. Slots can be a great way to relax and have a little fun, especially if proper etiquette is followed.

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Filed Under: Gambling Etiquette