Online casinos aim to be online replicas of the real brick and mortar gambling establishments all gamblers know and are drawn to.

In order to reproduce the atmosphere and the games themselves as accurately as possible, online casinos will employ the latest technologies in computer graphics, and will try to bring every single casino game onto the computer screen in countless variants and unprecedented visual splendor.

Online roulette is the equivalent of the real life roulette wheel in an online casino. I’m not going to do a detailed analysis of roulette odds here, but you probably already know there’s no system that will beat roulette in the long run. There are a couple of useful pointers you can stick to in order to maximize your chances, ( like playing European roulette instead of the American version which has a bigger house edge by virtue of the 00) but you can’t really apply a working mathematical system to roulette. Blaise Pascal invented it as a random number generator, and that’s exactly what it is.

Real roulette wheels could sometimes be read by a careful observer. Being cumbersome and expensive devices, the life-span of a real roulette wheel is quite a large one. During this time, it will be subjected to a lot of wear and tear. Sticky substances might adhere to its surface… the bearing system might be worn out…

Careful observers could pinpoint certain patterns in the way the ball rolled, though, on my part, I’d say that looking for such defects is a long shot in the best case. The casino will make sure that no exploitable problems appear on their roulette wheels.

In an online casino, hardware wear and tear is simply not an issue. There are digital random number generators that work for the roulette wheel, and you have to know, that no matter what a fancy-looking wheel you see spinning in the foreground, the shots are called by this random number generator from backstage.

Online blackjack is one of those games where skilled players stand a chance to deny the house its edge or to turn it around, even.

The simplest blackjack card-counting technique is to assign values to different cards like this: 10, J, Q, K,A are worth -1. 8,9 are 0. 2,3,4,5,6, are worth +1. Whenever there’s a card dealt, the player subtracts or adds 1 to a sum he/she keeps in mind. High cards offer the player an advantage, so the more such cards are left in the deck, the better the player’s chances are. The higher positive value the sum he’s counting is, the more such cards there are left in the deck ( simply because more low cards than high cards will have left the deck)

Online blackjack uses a completely randomized number generator too, so card counting won’t be of much help for you here.

Online slots are the most popular of all online casino games. No skill is required and they basically use the same kind of software video slots use in brick and mortar casinos. That means you get the exact same game you would get in a real casino if you played video poker there.

Most online slots are part of a large interlaced network of such machines, often spanning over several online casinos. These are called wide-area progressive slots. The losses the players register at these machines are all added up to form one giant jackpot. Whoever wins such a jackpot, will most probably become a millionaire for life. You also need to know, however, that the odds of you winning a large progressive jackpot are quite minimal.

Real casinos often have separate live poker rooms, where their guests can play poker against other human players.

This is probably the only feature online casinos have decided not to include in their offer. Poker rooms are available on the internet, though they’re usually separate entities, and don’t really mingle with online casinos.

Even in the real, brick and mortar casino world, slot rooms are preferred to poker rooms as they represent a lot better investment and a much quicker cash turnaround for the owners.

Why should people prefer online casinos to real live ones if both come with the same offer? - you might ask.

Online casinos are accessible from every corner of the globe at a few clicks of your mouse, you can play in your underwear if you choose so and you can have a 1 hour afternoon playing session whenever you feel like it.

Now, you can’t really do any of those things in a real casino, can you?

by James West

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 2:08 am and is filed under Poker Rooms, Slots, Sportsbooks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.