Understanding How Online Gambling Works – 15 Things You Need to Know

The online gambling market is an industry worth billions of dollars. But it’s amazing how little some people wonder, “How does online gambling work?” After all, it’s not like cars or fast food—not everyone participates.

It’s also difficult for some people to grasp how safe and legal it is to gamble online. They’d rather just take their cash to their nearest casino and keep it simple.

However, if you are interested in how it all works and if you should gamble online for real money, then there are certain things you should understand.

Don’t worry; I’ll explain how online gambling works below. It’s not that different from the casinos you already know and love. By the end, you’ll be ready to sign up and start gambling from the comfort of your own home.

Let’s get right into the truth about online casinos without further ado.

Online gambling isn’t exactly legal everywhere, but it isn’t exactly illegal, either. Confusing, right?

I’m writing this post from the United States, and the online gambling laws are murky at best. There are no federal laws explicitly banning activities like online casino games and online poker. However, the Federal Wire Act forbids sports betting over any kind of “telephone-like” device.

It is illegal for a person or company in the USA to offer gambling to US citizens if they are not licensed. That’s why many of the top US gambling sites are based overseas.

Most of the other laws related to real money online gambling in America are at a state level, and they vary wildly.

In some states, specific kinds of online gambling are explicitly illegal. For example, in the state of Washington, it’s a felony to play poker for money! (As far as I know, no one has ever been charged or prosecuted there, though.)

In a few states, online casino gambling is explicitly legal and regulated. In others, online sports betting has been legalized. Some states have regulated both these forms of gambling and even others.

And in still other states, the laws prohibiting gambling are intentionally broad. They’ll often say something to the effect that using any device for gambling purposes that isn’t specifically mentioned in the laws of the state is illegal. This would presumably include a computer that’s connected to the Internet.

But for practical purposes in the United States, gambling online might as well be completely legal. Gamblers are almost never charged or prosecuted for placing wagers online. The only exceptions I know of are a couple of cases related to sports betting, and in both of those cases, it’s likely that the sports bettors were facilitating bets for other people.

In other words, they were running their gambling like a business, which is always riskier than recreational gambling.

The United States authorities seem to treat online gambling the way they do some other vice crimes (like prostitution, for example). They focus their enforcement efforts on the business people who are providing the services to the customers rather than trying to arrest the customers themselves.

In the Middle East, it’s illegal to play chess in some countries. You can imagine how the laws of that country relate to blackjack played for money on the Internet.

Other countries enjoy unlimited access to almost any kind of legal online gambling that they want. England, for example, has a tightly controlled and active gambling industry.

Sports betting is a traditional activity that’s promoted heavily in England. You can hardly walk a block in London without seeing an advertisement or a billboard for an online bookmaker.

What does all this mean for you?

It means that it’s up to you to determine what level of risk you’re comfortable with. It’s also up to you to make an educated decision about whether or not it’s legal for you to gamble on the Internet from your jurisdiction. My advice, of course, is to obey the law where you live.

You should at least research the laws and realize that online gambling can carry legal risks compared to traditional brick-and-mortar gambling.

If you choose to gamble online, make sure to use only safe and trusted gambling sites. You can start by following the steps below.

This statement applies to online casino games, bingo, and poker games. But it obviously has no bearing when it comes to online sports betting.

If you want to understand a little bit about the online gambling niche, you should start by learning about the random number generator (RNG).

Here’s a quick look at how RNG’s are programmed for casino games.

• All online casino games (apart from a live dealer online casino) use a random number generator program.
• A random number generator is a computer program that generates random numbers.
• Those random numbers determine game outcomes (such as what cards are dealt).

This isn’t unusual, by the way. All the gambling machines (slots and video poker) you see in a traditional land-based casino use the same kind of software to determine their outcomes, too.

The program is essentially just a list of numbers. Each of those numbers corresponds to an outcome in a gambling game. The program cycles through those numbers thousands of times per second. When you hit the “deal” button in a game of online blackjack, for example, that program stops on whatever number it was at during that millisecond.

The parameters for these programs usually correspond to the game you’re playing so that you’re seeing the same odds you would in a real casino.

On a traditional American roulette wheel, you have 38 numbers. Each of those has an equal chance of being the result on any given spin. The random number generator duplicates this probability.

You have a 1/38 chance of any given result on a spin of the wheel, regardless of whether you’re playing on an actual physical reel in Las Vegas or on an animated reel at an online casino with roulette.

You’re playing single-deck blackjack at an online casino. The random number generator has numbers corresponding to each card in the deck. Each time you press the “deal” button or take a hit, the random number generator has a 1/52 chance of dealing with a particular card.

But it also keeps track of which cards have already been played, so you don’t wind up getting duplicate cards. The net effect is to duplicate the odds you’d see if you were playing blackjack at a regular casino.

It doesn’t matter if you’re playing poker, bingo, or craps—the computer program (the RNG) behind the results works in approximately the same way. The only thing that changes is the parameters for that game.

A large percentage of the profits made in the land-based casino industry in the USA come from slot machines. The same is true in lots of other countries.

For example, I know that Australians LOVE playing the “pokies” with a passion that’s hard to understand. Finding a blackjack table in a land-based casino can be done—it’s just not easy.

A lot of online gambling profits come from slots, too.

Online slot machines are about as close as you can get to duplicating the traditional casino experience on the Internet. The technology works in largely the same way. Like online casinos, land-based slot machines also use random number generator programs.

In fact, the days of mechanical and electro-mechanical slot machines are long gone. Even the slots in a traditional casino which LOOK like mechanical slots are powered by a computer program.

Here’s how a modern slot machine works, online or off.

You have several spinning reels. Often you might have 3 reels, but 5 reels is more common now. Each of those reels has several “stops.” Some of them are blank, and some of them have symbols on them. (On some machines, there are no blank stops.)

Each stop has a probability of coming up on any given spin, but it’s not necessarily the same as the other stops. For example, you might have a bar symbol that’s programmed to show up with a probability of 1/10, but the cherry symbol might have a probability of 1/20.

The designers of these games know the probabilities of each symbol appearing. They can then calculate the probabilities of combinations of these symbols. They then program the payoffs for those combinations to give the house a mathematical edge over the player.

Let’s use that cherry symbol with the 1/20 chance of appearing as an example.  Let’s say you’re playing on a 3 reel machine. The probability of getting a cherry on each reel is 1/20 X 1/20 X 1/20, or 1/8000.

The designer programs the 3 cherries to pay off at 6000 to 1. That seems like a great payout, but look at what happens to your bankroll if you achieve mathematically perfect results.

Suppose you’re betting $1 per spin. You make 8000 spins, contributing $8000 to the casino. But you’ve won $6000, so the casino only gets to keep $2000.

A casino, either online or off, relies on the laws of large numbers to make its profit. Since they have hundreds of machines being played by hundreds of gamblers for hundreds of spins per hour, their results start resembling the mathematical expectation in short order.

This is why the casino doesn’t mind when you win. If you never won at a slot machine, you’d never play, which would be disastrous for their business model.

In the long run, though, the casino always wins more on its slot machines than it pays out in winnings.

This is true of almost every other casino game, too. I’ll explain why later. If slots tend to grab the most of your attention, you’ll be smart to touch up on your slot machine strategy.

Not all online gambling games are powered by a random number generator. Some casinos offer the option of playing some table games via video with real live dealers and actual decks of cards, roulette wheels, or dice. Basically, the game is replicated as if it were being played in a land-based casino.

Live dealer blackjack is especially popular. But don’t think that this is an easy way to count cards online. It’s not.

Counting cards is one of the few ways to be a long-term winner in the casino. It’s not hard to do once you know how. You just assign a value to the low cards in the deck and a value to the high cards in the deck. Then you move your count up and down as the cards are dealt.

This is a heuristic method for keeping up with the ratio of high cards to low cards that are left in the deck. When there are a lot of high cards (aces and tens) left in the deck, you have a better chance of being dealt a “natural” or a blackjack. Since that hand pays out at 3 to 2 instead of even money, you raise the size of your bets when the deck is stacked in your favor.

But this only works in a game where the deck doesn’t get shuffled on every hand.

When you’re playing a traditional Internet game, the random number generator ALWAYS starts with a freshly shuffled deck of cards. After all, why wouldn’t it? You’re using a computer program. It takes no time or effort for a computer program to reshuffle a deck of cards.

But many neophyte blackjack players on the Internet might not realize that live dealer blackjack casinos also shuffle after every hand. They use automatic shuffling machines for this purpose.

Most, if not all, casinos on the Internet use automatic shufflers.

That’s not to say that blackjack isn’t the best game available at many Web casinos. It is. The house edge at some online casinos—assuming you’re playing with perfect basic strategy—is as close to 0 as any you’ll find.

But that’s not true of every blackjack game. Do a little research into the rules variations being used where you play to see what the house edge is for yourself. Most gambling websites I’ve played at offered at least half a dozen blackjack variations, but only one or two of them offered the best odds. The other games aren’t even worth playing if your goal is to keep the house edge low.

As I said, counting cards is one way to ensure you are a long-term winner at the casino. It might not work as smoothly at an online gambling site, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to know how to do it.

New casino gamblers online are often impressed with their ability to get free money to play with just by signing up to play at an online casino. These offers are there to incentivize new players to sign up and gamble. They seem, at first glance, anyway, to be a can’t-lose situation. The reality is not quite as pretty.

Here’s how most online casino signup bonuses work: You deposit a certain amount of money, and the casino matches those funds at a certain bonus percentage. For example, you might be playing at a casino with a 200% matching bonus worth up to $400.

Casinos don’t want to be taken advantage of. Early advantage gamblers quickly did the math on these kinds of promotions and figured out they could use the extra funds to get an edge over the casino.

In the early days of online gambling, wagering requirements for cashing out were minimal. You were generally only required to wager your entire deposit plus bonus once before cashing out. In the case of the example I’m using now, you’d need to make $600 in wagers before being eligible to cash out.

But suppose you’re playing blackjack. It’s not even an especially good blackjack game, either—the rules are set up so that the house edge is 1%.

You wager your $600; your expected loss is only $6. You expect to have $594 left. You cash out, and you’ve made $394 profit, most of it because of your signup bonus.

So, casinos started raising their wagering requirements. For a while, wagering requirements were more like 12X or 15X of your deposit plus a bonus. Instead of having to wager $600 before cashing out, you might have to wager $7200 or $9000.

But smart blackjack players would still have an edge. 1% of $7200 is still only $72. 1% of $9000 is only $90. That still leaves the bonus player with a significant profit.

Casinos decided to start disallowing wagers on games with a low house edge, or at least limiting how much they counted towards wagering requirements.

At most online casinos, only wagers placed on slot machine games count fully toward fulfilling your wagering requirements.

Wagering requirements themselves have increased over time. Now it’s common to find casinos that require you to wager 25X, 35X, or even 50X your deposit plus a bonus before being eligible to cash out.

I’ll be generous and assume that the online casino in this example has slot machines with a 95% payback percentage. That means the house edge is 5%.

I’ll also assume that this casino skews toward the lower end of the wagering requirements and only demands that you bet 25X your deposit plus a bonus.

25 times $600 is $15,000 in total wagers. 5% of $15,000 is $750. Since you started with a bankroll of $600, your expected winnings are -$150.

And most casinos have higher wagering requirements and a lower payback percentage on their slots games.

Don’t get me wrong. Free money is great, and you can still come out ahead when using a casino bonus. But that bonus doesn’t necessarily give you better odds of walking away a winner at all.

That said, you’ll certainly want to know more about online casino bonuses and rewards. Check out our guide below.

Many people misunderstand how online casino games work. They assume that the casinos are able to manipulate the results behind the scenes to guarantee their profits.

You might remember a scene in the movie Casablanca where Rick has his croupier rig the game so that a particular player could win a certain amount of money. That’s not how it works in real life, online or off. The house gets its edge by paying out winnings at less than the odds of winning.

I’ll use roulette as an example since we were just discussing it in the context of Casablanca.

The single number bet is one of the most popular bets at the roulette table. It’s a bet that a specific number will come up. The odds of that happening are 37 to 1. That’s pretty easy to understand, right?

There are 38 numbers on the wheel. When you bet on one of them, you have 37 ways to lose and 1 way to win. The bet pays off at 35 to 1.

See the difference?

Here’s what it means mathematically, though.

Let’s look at one of the even money bets as an example. Let’s say you’re betting on black. The roulette wheel has 18 black spots, 18 red spots, and 2 green spots. That means the odds of winning are 20 to 18. (You have 20 ways to lose and 18 ways to win.)

You place $100 bets on 38 spins and lose 20 times for a net loss of $2000. You win 18 times for a net win of $1800. (This bet pays even money instead of 35 to 1.) Again, you’ve lost $200 in 38 bets, or $5.26 average per bet.

All casino games work in a similar manner. You place a bet and get paid off at a certain amount when you win. But the odds offered by the payoffs are always less than the odds of winning.

You might argue that this constitutes rigging the game. You might be correct. But it’s not the same type of rigging that most people think of when they talk about rigged games.

The casinos have no control over who wins or loses on a particular spin of the roulette wheel. Their blackjack dealers aren’t card sharps. They’re not using loaded dice.

They don’t have to.

And this is just as true of an online casino as it is of a traditional casino. In fact, casinos have an incentive not to cheat. Since they have nothing to gain—the math’s already rigged in their favor—they have to consider what they have to lose.

In the case of online gambling, reputation is everything. And gamblers talk. If an online casino cheated with the results of their games, they’d get caught.

If you’ve read any pages on the Internet offering legitimate tips for slot machine players, you’ve heard of loyalty clubs at casinos. They’re sometimes called slots clubs or players clubs. But they all work more or less in the same way:

They track how much you play and how much you’re risking when you play. Then they provide you with rebates and comps equal to a percentage of what your expected losses are.

You’re playing at a casino in Oklahoma. You play the dollar slots, and you visit the casino twice a week and spend 4 hours playing each time.

Since you’re expected to lose $384 a week, it makes sense for the casino to give you 2 comp meals at the buffet every time you’re there. That’s 4 meals costing $20 each, or $80. The casino still makes a $300 profit.

And actually, they make even more than that because the cost of those meals is probably closer to $6 or $7.

Depending on how much you gamble and how often, they might be willing to provide you with even more comps and even send you cash rebates or free spins on their slots.

But it’s all based on your expected loss.

That number is easily calculated. It’s the product of the amount you’re betting per wager, the number of wagers you make per hour, and the number of hours you play.

Internet casinos provide the same kinds of rewards, although they usually provide these rewards in the form of cash rewards or rebates. An Internet casino doesn’t have a buffet on site.

I’ve heard that high rollers on the Internet get special treatment just like high rollers at land-based casinos. This means you get your own host, and he rolls out the red carpet for you. This means free trips, event tickets, and meals out.

If you’re a high roller at an Internet casino, you should always contact the casino to find out what kinds of rewards they can offer you. They can probably even increase the size of your betting limits.

When you first wondered, “how does online gambling work,” you probably thought that cheating would be a major issue. It can be hard to snuff out someone who is cheating at an online site, but it’s not as common of an issue as you might think.

Cheating at online poker can be defined in various ways. One way is data mining. At one time, most Internet cardrooms had no rules preventing the use of software that tracked players’ statistics en masse. You could pay for a subscription and get access to their database, and it would act as an overlay on top of the poker application.

Historically, you can see how often a particular player put money into the pot. You could see whether he was overall profitable. You could see how often he placed in tournaments. And you could use that information to make better educated decisions about how to play against him.

Is this cheating?

Some might argue that it isn’t. They might contend that they’re using information that anyone else could access. Most online cardrooms disagree, though. They now forbid the use of this kind of software.

Some online cardrooms, such as the one at Ignition Casino, have eliminated the problem entirely by making the players anonymous. When you play Texas hold’em at Ignition, your designation is Player 1 or Player 2.

You can take notes on your opponent while you’re at the table with them, but those notes disappear when the player leaves the table. But that’s not the only kind of cheating that’s gone on at Internet cardrooms. Collusion is another example.

Most cardrooms have software that helps them identify collusion when they see it. For example, if a player has pocket kings and folds them when you have pocket aces, that’s a clue that something might be wrong.

But those aren’t the only examples.

A few years ago, some poker forum members noticed some odd playing patterns from some other players at Absolute Poker. It turns out that Absolute Poker had a “super-user” login, where someone who was logged in as a super-user could see all the other players’ hole cards.

The outrage over this event resulted in ruined reputations for multiple players. It also meant the end of the line for the businesses involved.

This is another example of something I mention every time I write about Internet gambling sites and their reputations. Regardless of how strict or lax the licensing authority in question is, the site’s reputation is the make-it-or-break-it factor that will determine whether or not the business succeeds.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m discouraging you from playing poker online, either. I’m just encouraging you to go into it with your eyes open. The best real money poker sites can prevent cheaters.

Did you ever wonder why it’s so hard to make a profit betting on sports? It’s actually similar to how the casinos make their money.

The book makers require you to wager at least $110 for every $100 you win. Some of the Internet book makers even require wagers of $120 to win $100. Usually, they’ve set the lines in such a manner that you’ll have a roughly even chance to win.

So, let’s say you’re a sports bettor who bets on 100 games per season. You’re smart, but once you take into account the lines (or the point spreads, as they’re called), you’ve only won 50% of your bets.

So, you’ve lost $110 on 50 games and won $100 on 50 games. Your losses are $5500, and your winnings are $5000, so your net loss is $500. Over 100 games, that means you’ve lost an average of $5 per game.

If this were a casino game, that would be considered the house edge, but in sports betting terms, it’s called the “vig” or “vigorish”. The phrase basically means something similar to commission. But in a nutshell, it’s the reason the sports book is able to operate at a profit.

Here’s what happens in that case: You win 53 times for a total of $5300 won. You lose 47 times for a total of $5170 in losses. Your net profit is $130, or $1.30 per game.

And winning 53% of the time ain’t easy, folks, regardless of whether you’re placing the bets online or off. They use the same oddsmakers to set the point spreads. And those guys have the most advanced software in the business to help them determine the point spreads.

Let’s talk about point spreads for a minute, too. I’m an American writer, and so when I write about sports betting, I’m thinking mostly about betting on football.

When you’re betting on football, one of the teams is almost always the favorite. You’ll rarely find a game where the teams are evenly matched. When one of the teams is favored over the other, they have to subtract the point spread from their score to determine whether or not they’ve won.

If the Green Bay Packers are a 3 point favorite over the Cowboys, and if they win 10-7, you still lose your bet, because they didn’t beat the point spread. Their score of 10 has 3 subtracted from it, which means the game resulted in an effective tie.

The point spread is used by the books to make sure that they get an equal amount of action on either side of the game. From the book maker’s perspective, it makes sense to get half the money on one team and half on the other. That way the book can use their winnings from one side to pay off their losses to the other side.

And since everyone is laying $110 to win $100, the book makes a profit.

A book maker takes 100 bets on a game. 50 of the bets are one side, and 50 are on the other side. They’ve collected a total of $11,000—100 bets at $110 each. Only 50 of those bets win, and the book only has to pay them $5000 in winnings.

That’s how bookmakers stay in business, and they have the same business model on the Internet as they do in Vegas.

Part of figuring out, “how does online gambling work” is knowing everything about the industry. This ranges from the casinos themselves to the companies trying to make a buck off them as well.

The sad truth about the Internet is that when there’s a lot of money to be made, people will invest the minimum effort and expense into making the biggest return they can. Internet casinos are insanely profitable. The average player is probably worth a minimum of $1000 over the life of the player.

Most online casinos are willing to pay between $100 and $500 in referral fees to webmasters who refer these players to their business.

This gives information portals a huge incentive to say nice things about the casino in question, regardless of whether or not those nice things are true.

And many of these information portals rely on traffic from search engines for their marketing plans and business models to work. One popular phrase that results in a lot of conversions is “example casino review”.

Yes, you can find some real reviews of online casinos by searching for reviews on Google. But you’ll probably find 9 advertorials for every legitimate review.

How often have you reviewed a product on Amazon and called it “the premier example of this product”?

That’s the kind of thing a marketer would write for an ad. It’s not the kind of thing a real reviewer would write about a product he’s reviewing.

In fact, legitimate reviews will usually include a list of pros and cons about a product. You’ll find few casino reviews which list the pros and cons of a casino. Most of them just list the selling points of the casino.

But that’s not the only kind of bogus information you’ll find on the Internet related to gambling.

Another popular type of site is the one that sells bogus gambling systems to unsuspecting readers. You can recognize these easily, because they’ll offer vague promises about how you can beat games which are mathematically unbeatable. They’ll offer no real advice on their sales page, either.

They’ll just promise you the ability to earn insane amounts of money using their “little known expert secrets”.

But here’s the deal: There is no system that will get you a mathematical edge at roulette or craps.

There are legitimate advantage gambling techniques you can learn, but those are limited to certain activities. And there aren’t many of them.

You can get an edge at the following gambling activities:

• Blackjack
• Fantasy Sports
• Horse Betting
• Poker
• Sports Betting
• Video Poker

You might also sometimes be able to take advantage of a promotion at another game which puts the odds in your favor, but that’s rare.

One way to get a little more confidence in the site that you’re reading is to look for sites where an author’s name is attached to the page. That’s not a guarantee of quality, but it’s a clue. If the author’s name links to an about page for that writer, and that about page includes a detailed biography and photo of the author, that’s another clue that the site and its information is for real.

Be wary of anonymously written content, though.

You might also consider the length of a page. If you spend a little time on this site, you’ll notice that the other writers and I cover subjects in-depth. That demonstrates that a certain amount of care and effort went into the production of these pages. That’s a clue that you’re looking at something worthwhile, too.

Since most online casinos and gambling sites are located offshore (again, I’m writing from an American perspective), the licensing authorities that govern their activities are also offshore.

This doesn’t mean that a casino or sportsbook licensed by one of these authorities is bad. It just means you can’t put as much confidence into some of these jurisdictions as you can others.

On the other hand, some of these licensing authorities are strict indeed. They audit their licensees and keep close tabs on them.

How do you know the difference? Some of it’s just common sense.

The Isle of Man, for example, is part of the United Kingdom. They license gaming sites, sure, but they’re strict about it. The cost of getting a license there is astronomical. That weeds out some of the greedier and less ethical elements immediately.

Kahnawake, on the other hand, is just a tiny Indian tribe in Canada. Getting a gambling license from them is inexpensive. They provide little to no oversight of their licensees.

Here’s a list of some of the jurisdictions which license online casinos:

The industry also has several regulatory organizations that online gambling sites can become part of. Some of these memberships mean something, but not all of them do.

And there are also organizations which audit the numbers behind the scenes. Some of these organizations include:

There’s a bewildering number of organizations of various categories that license, represent, and audit Internet gambling sites. Treat all of them with a skeptical eye, but some of them are better than others.

Your jurisdiction as a player matters, too. If you’re from the United States, you’ll have a hard time finding a casino on the Internet that’s licensed in the United Kingdom, for example. Those properties tend to avoid accepting real money players from the USA.

I mentioned earlier that this is one of the most lucrative industries on the Internet. Any time there is a lot of money involved, opportunists are everywhere.

You won’t find a lot of players’ forums anymore, but even on the ones you do find, remember that you’re dealing with anonymous members.

You’d be surprised at how easy they are to spot when you become aware of them. Just knowing that they exist makes their posts pop out like a sore thumb.

You can even find people complaining about casinos who are representing that casino’s competitors.

It’s a strange industry. I enjoy gambling online. I think a lot of people do, and I don’t begrudge them those pleasures. But be aware that you have to be cautious.

My online gambling facts are going to continue by highlighting how large the industry is and how rapidly it’s growing. Recent studies tell us that iGaming has grown more than 20% in the last year.

This fact is important to understand. Here’s how that compares to some other industries:

The other factor to keep in mind is the value of a single customer. Sure, a restaurant customer might be worth $1000 a year or more to a restaurant. But how much is an average gambler worth over time?

Depending on the demographics, probably quite a bit more than that.

The truth about casinos is that not all of them have great customer service. One of the worst things that can happen to you is that you can’t pull your money out and you have to contact the help center.

In fact, when you hear about an Internet casino cheating customers, it almost never has anything to do with them dealing an unfair game. It almost always has to do with a customer who is having problems getting her withdrawal processed. That’s the nature of this business.

If you spend any time at all on player forums, you’ll find that having a hard time collecting your winnings is the #1 challenge you’ll face. You won’t find this problem at all casinos, though. The sites listed on our site have been thoroughly vetted, in fact.

We can’t guarantee that you’ll have a great experience at every casino we refer you to. But we do spend a lot of time looking into the reputations of the properties listed here. We’re confident that the casinos on our site conduct themselves with integrity.

In fact, one of the advantages of signing up at an Internet casino through an informational portal such as ours is the fact that you have someone you can go to and ask for help when advocating for yourself. Casinos listed on this site (and on other sites) have an interest in keeping their partners happy. They can’t do that if the partners are getting player complaints.

After all, who has more pull with the casino—an individual player, or a site that refers to dozens or maybe even hundreds of players per month?

You sign up at a casino and deposit $200 and get a $400 bonus. You have a 35X wagering requirement, so you have to place $21,000 in wagers before cashing out.

On your first spin of the wheel, you win a $10,000 jackpot. By the time you finish your $21,000 in wagers, you wind up with $8000. You go to the cashier and withdraw your funds. Then nothing happens.

A few days later, you contact customer service to ask about the status of your withdrawal. They advise you that they need further documentation as proof of your identity.

You contact customer service again, and this time they tell you that they received the copies of the documents you sent, but something was wrong and the files weren’t clear enough.

At this point, you figure what the heck. You already have the money in the account. Maybe you can run it up to $10,000 while you’re waiting for customer service to review your documents. But instead, you lose $3000.

You immediately try to withdraw the $5000, but it doesn’t work.

These stalling tactics are done in the hopes that you’ll eventually go back into your account and lose all the money you’ve won. It’s unethical, but it’s effective.

After all, we are talking about casino gamblers here. They love to play, and if the money’s in the account, they’re likely to take a shot at a big win. But since the house has a mathematical edge, the longer you play, the more likely you are to lose.

In the end, you’re going to want to stick with the best online casinos. By doing this, you avoid any possibility of this nightmare of a situation.

You might come away from reading some of these facts to think that I’m negative about online gambling. That’s not the case. In fact, I’m pro-gambling.

I think adults who earn their own money should be allowed to spend that money on anything they want to, even games of chance where the other party has an edge.

I also think that those adults have a responsibility to educate themselves about the games they’re playing and how the math works. But I’d rather gamble at a casino than play the lottery.

Here’s why: The lottery offers the worst odds in the business. Your odds of winning are about 1 in 13,983,816. No self-respecting casino offers games with a house edge of 50%.

I’m baffled as to why the American public is so willing to take such a bad bet.

The fact of the matter is that most Americans play the lottery because it’s the only game in town.

And the smarmy commercials that make the outrageous claims about how much good that additional revenue does are sickening. Most of the money collected from lotteries goes to pay for corporate subsidies and tax breaks. That money isn’t specifically earmarked for education at all.

You can do some before and after analysis of most state’s budgets to see that their education budgets never increase after the establishment of a lottery in that state.

The lottery has been called a tax on people who can’t do math, but it’s more than that. It’s also a regressive tax on the poor—the people who can least afford to be gambling. And the irony is that if people were better educated about math and personal finance, they would NEVER buy a lottery ticket. NEVER. And the money generated by the lottery is supposed to go to education.

Notice the conflict of interest there?

I think most people who like to gamble are better off playing at an Internet casino or bingo hall than they are buying a scratch off ticket at the grocery store. Even if you don’t play the games with the best odds (blackjack and video poker), you’re still getting odds that are way better than those offered by the lottery.

Then again, if enough people did that, the state governments might actually step up their enforcement efforts related to online gambling. That would be a drag, too.

Maybe the solution is to take a look at what various politicians think about gambling on the Internet and using that as a factor when deciding how to vote.

I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.

You might enjoy scratch offs, but no longer want to play the lottery. If that’s the case, I would recommend checking out the best scratch off games at online casinos.

Best Free Scratch Off Games to Try Online – Demon Train and More

One of the best free scratch off games online is Demon Train, which has an RTP of 95%. The Bank Heist from BetUS has a great layout, in addition to a payout of up to 500x your wager. One of the most popular free scratch off games is Bingo, which is available...

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So, how does online gambling work? We’ve touched on the laws, RNG, the online gambling industry, and more. As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts here.

Online gambling can be a lot of fun, but it’s more fun when you know exactly what you’re getting into. That’s the main reason I wrote this post. I wanted to make sure you knew most of the above online gambling facts before getting involved.

Of course, if you’re already involved, it’s still important that you’re up to date on the facts about the industry. A smart gambler is an educated gambler. With any luck, this post is just the beginning of your real money gambling education.

Any site can grasp your attention with a big welcome bonus, but that could just be their way of getting you to sign up. Once you do, there might not be a chance that you get your money back.

So, you probably want to know how to find honest online casinos. I’ll point you in the right direction.

How To Find Honest Online Casinos – 9 Tips For Locating Trustworthy Sites

One way to spot trustworthy online casinos is to see if their registration process is fair and straightforward. It’s important to know if the casino you’re signing up at has been blacklisted before. Honest online casinos will publish their odds and RTP...

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Footnotes:

• Financial information about casinos is from American Gaming.
• Zippia provided restaurant revenue numbers.