Online Casino

Betting on the future is something everybody does most of the time. It doesn't have to mean putting money down on the outcome of an event, but we still gamble on the future in the choices that we make.

So when Las Vegas casino bosses sit around the table to hammer out the future of their casinos, the choices they make can determine whether those casinos become more prosperous, or decline into financial difficulties. Those bosses, by the decisions they will make, are literally gambling with the future of their casinos.

The very definition of gambling, which is "taking a chance on winning," binds both players and operators tightly together in a graceful dance of "win some and lose some." The difference between the experienced gambler or their hosts and the car driver mentioned earlier is that experienced gamblers do not take uncalculated risks. They weigh up the odds of winning and do their best to make them as favourable as possible before laying down their money. The very same thing goes for the casino bosses. In both cases, gambler and casino boss are gambling with the future, or taking that chance on winning.

Of course, they can't both win. In any game of chance there must be a winner and a loser. The casino already has the odds stacked in its favour, so it's down to the gambler to do what he can to even up those odds so at least he has a fighting chance. And that's the game which is played out day in and day out between gambler and casino.

The casino knows that if they have too strong a chance of winning every time, no one would spend a penny in their establishment, so they have to find a fine balance between making a profit and dangling a big enough carrot in front of the gambler to make him part with his money. The gambler, for his part knows that the casino has the edge, but that the edge is slim enough to make it highly possible to walk away a winner.

Then it comes down to the actual game, which often distinguished the men from the boys. Or the women for the girls, as the case may be.

The more experienced gambler who knows their stuff will more often than not opt for a game where they can tip the balance in their favour by the employment of skill. Purely skill games do not live in casinos, or they'd soon go out of business. However, games that combine skill and chance certainly do exist and it's these that the experienced gambler will seek out. Games such as blackjack or poker variants such as Caribbean poker can be found in most casinos, be they online or live and they offer the player more choices than the simple win or lose options offered by pure games of chance, such as roulette or slots.

With blackjack, a player can watch the cards being dealt and determine the odds of certain cards being drawn next. Of course, this is frowned upon by casinos and card counters will be ejected if caught, but playing and betting sensibly while acting normally will keep an experienced blackjack player sitting at his table for long enough to make a decent profit. Of course, online this strategy doesn't work and even with blackjack the player is at the mercy of a computer program.

So what makes gamblers flock to online casinos in preference to land based casinos, especially those flashy, glitzy behemoths that occupy The Strip in Las Vegas and all the pampering and perks that go with them?

In a word: odds. Online casinos have lower overheads to contend with, so they can offer a much tighter house edge to their customers. That translates into better odds of winning. Experienced gamblers like those odds and that's what attracts them.

So where in their current predicament does that leave all of the land based casinos that are trying to fend off competition from their online counterparts?

They are left in the boardroom, gambling with their future. They are not having an easy time of it, either. With something like $5.9 billion spent in online casinos in the US during 2008 despite the fact that it is illegal and $36.2 billion spent in total for all other forms of gambling for the same period, that's a lot of dollars potentially lost by land casinos. Whatever the casino bosses come up with, it had better be good. Their future rests upon them betting on the right option and the odds are not, for once, in their favour.