Online Casinos
Casinos rise and fall faster than you can blink an eye. The
first casino was opened in 1941 on the Los Vegas strip; however
by 1992 all of those casinos had been demolished to make way for
new modern casinos. Online it has been the same evolution with
casinos sprouting around every corner of cyberspace. These have
come and gone faster than the click of your mouse. But how did
this start?
Let's start with Google the internet search engine. Type in
online casino and it brings back more than 27 million websites.
The shear volume for the term online casino reflects how many
people have vested interests in the gaming industry and how
popular online casinos have become. The first online casinos
first made their appearance during 1996 and a mere US$17 million
was wagered, compared to US$3 billion by 2000.
It is estimated today that more than a trillion dollars gets
spent online each year with online casinos worldwide. Bear
Stearns, a leading worldwide investment banking and securities
trading and brokerage firm, estimates that during 2003 more than
US$ 6 billion had been spent on online casinos by US gamblers
alone! With the growing adoption of broadband internet this
online pool of gamblers increases each year.
With online casinos there has also been the expansion of online
advertising to gamblers, which according to the BBC places
gambling advertisers as the fifth largest advertisers on the
internet. Online casinos make use of two types of software.
Those that you can download and install onto your computer and
the true online casinos where you gamble on the interface of the
online casinos web page. Each party makes their choices of how
they wish to interact online. With all this sophisticated
software, how do online casinos compare to your average brick
and mortar casino? Each has their advantages. In an online
casino you can play more than one poker game at a time or even
gamble on more than one game at a time. In a normal casino this
would not be physically possible. The advantage of any real
casino compared to an online casino is that you can always judge
the physical reaction of the players around the table.
With an online casino it is impersonal and you would never be
able to guess the cards the other person is holding. Online
casinos have made great strides in trying to mimic the feel of a
real casino in the fashion of the bricks and mortar casinos.
They have flashy web pages and music to lure you to play. Domain
names in it self have become a big issue with the purchase of
misspelled domain names for online casinos.
A recent dispute with the domain name of Sportsodds springs to
mind. This domain name was registered by their competitor to
drive traffic to the competitor's webpage's. This ended in a
legal dispute. Online casinos are big business judging from the
amount of money that gets placed on bets and by the amount of
money being spent on it. Where there is big money, there will
always be disputes.
Online casinos are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and they
are accessible from anywhere in the world. Casinos use to be
down the road or in your next big town. That has changed in the
21st century. With the advent of online casinos the casino is
now in your home. Better yet, if you are reading this, you are
already at the casinos doorstep. What is stopping you from
placing your bet at an online casino today and joining millions
of others?