The success of online casinos is down to the range of casino games

Here at onlinecasino.ie we are often surprised when people say they do not understand why online gambling has become increasingly popular, particularly what we now call online casino gambling. Gambling on horse racing has almost become something of a national sport in Ireland and until the smoking ban our bingo clubs were also well attended almost every night of the week. The lottery has also been extremely successful, so why should we be surprised that the opportunity to follow horse racing online and to play a huge range of different casino games online all, from the comfort of our home homes has become a popular way to spend our leisure time. When the big bookmakers decided to try increasing the return on their capital investment in online sports gambling sites by adding a few games, took a bit of a gamble because that decision would inevitably incur significant further costs. The online sports gambling sites clearly needed good management software to successfully run the financial aspects of operating a site dealing directly with the public, but introducing casino games required a whole new level of casino software. Established traditional casino games such as roulette and blackjack obviously did not need to be invented, but they did need good graphics to attract casino games fans to the idea of playing these games online. As it turned out the casino game of roulette did not prove as easy to recreate online as most of the other traditional casino games, particularly in the eyes of the serious roulette enthusiasts. This led to even more investment being necessary to set up studios from which the games could be screened live with real dealers. The vast majority of the casino games we can now play at our online casinos are however slots games in various forms, almost all of which have been designed and supplied by specialist online casino software companies. What we do know however is that the major bookmakers do not take many risks, and rarely lose a bet so when they decided to spend money on creating online casinos as part of their existing online sports gambling sites they were clearly quite confident that the idea would be successful. It has to be said that they were also very clever in their choice of which casino games to feature on their sites. Casino games such as roulette and blackjack were clear bound to be popular with existing real casino members, as were the other traditional casino games such as baccarat, backgammon and craps, none of which were actually available in our own casinos in Ireland. Bingo fans and lottery players were also high on their list of potential customers, so online bingo and a range of other numbers games based on the concept of bingo were also likely to appeal to an existing group of games enthusiasts. The same was true of the online casino games based on the idea of lottery scratch cards which were introduced on most of the first online casino sites. Having established an initial customer base from these targeted groups the next stage in the development of the huge array of different online casino games was fairly obvious. Almost everybody in the modern world has played and enjoyed slot machines at some point in their lives, whether it was in an arcade on a rainy day at the seaside or in the pub on a regular Friday night out. Offering casino games based on the games played on slot machines was therefore bound to be a successful approach to expanding the range of games we could play online, and so it proved. The online casino software designers have been able to negotiate licensing agreements with the big media companies who own the rights to our favourite cartoon and film characters, and have therefore been able to theme many of their online slots games on those characters. They have also been able to design slots games which offer far more winning lines than previously available, with as many as five reels in play. There are now even slots games which use falling blocks instead of the traditional reels, all of which have led to the online casinos becoming a huge success.

We have so far discussed some of the online casino games which have been very successfully used to appeal to existing groups of gaming enthusiasts, but there is one traditional casino game which has almost been brought back from the dead as a result of the introduction of online casinos. The game of poker has a very long history but had become very marginalised in Ireland over recent years. Clearly part of the reason for that was of course the limited opportunities for most of us to play the game, which except for the occasional local tournament organised by one of our casinos meant that poker was probably only played regularly amongst groups of friends at someone’s house. Nowadays poker has become one of the most fashionable of all the traditional casino games, not only online but even the big poker tournaments are often oversubscribed leading to the need for qualifying rounds to be held to get a seat at the main event. For many years roulette and blackjack were undoubtedly the most popular traditional casino games played in Ireland, but there is evidence to suggest that Texas Hold’em poker is catching up very rapidly and may even be more popular online than those two stalwarts of our real casinos. The Texas Hold’em format of poker has become the game of choice for serious poker players because it is the version of poker played at almost all the major international tournaments, but all the online casinos also offer a full range of other poker games which can be played against the house for fixed odds. This is important because anyone with ambitions to play poker seriously needs to have somewhere to learn the game before trying their luck at one of the increasingly popular online poker forums.