The free online casino option serves several purposes

Here at onlinecasino.ie we have been monitoring the development of online casinos for a long time, and during that time we have seen a number of interesting innovations introduced with the aim of improving the experience of playing casino games online. We should of course remember that the first of what we now call online casinos were the result of the big bookmakers looking to increase the revenues from their online sports gambling sites by adding a few casino games to those sites. It was a move which proved so popular that the online casino sections of those sites began to become more and more important to the site operators, leading them to invest in adding even more games and to develop a number of new ideas such as the live casino option. For some fans of the more traditional casino games such as roulette this was a very welcome new feature, but a far more significant development for most online casino games players was the free online casino option because it applies to a much wider range of casino games. Online bookmakers nowadays often offer free bets or cash back deals to attract new customers, but the free online casino feature was not necessarily introduced as a marketing strategy, it was aimed more at encouraging us to try a much wider range of different games. Prior to the introduction of online casinos most casino games fans in Ireland were limited to only playing roulette, blackjack and the occasional game of poker when their local casino organised an in-house tournament for their members. That was because almost all our real casinos were relatively small and had limited floor space. Online casinos however have no such restrictions and can therefore offer us the opportunity to play literally hundreds of different games on their sites. We can now play a lot more traditional casino games such as baccarat, backgammon and even craps, all of which are extremely popular casino games played in casinos all over the world but have rarely been available here in Ireland. Clearly craps is no more difficult to play than roulette, and the layout of the craps table is very similar to a roulette table, so you could argue that the option to pay a few games of craps free of charge is not really that important. Backgammon however is a traditional casino game which does require an element of skill and experience to play successfully. It is still a game of chance of course because the number of moves each player can make is determined by the throw of two dice, but the skill comes in how you move the checkers around the board in response to the result of the throw of the dice. The free online casino feature is therefore very useful when learning how to play backgammon.

It is not always how complicated a game is as to whether the free play option is a valuable option however, and the game of baccarat illustrates that perfectly. For a variety of reasons the traditional casino game of baccarat had established a reputation for being a complicated game played only by high rollers away from the main floor of the casino. Before the introduction of online casinos most Irish casino games enthusiasts had never had the opportunity to play baccarat so that impression was perfectly understandable. Now of course we can play baccarat at almost every online casino and we now realise that it is in fact probably one of the easiest online casino games to play, rather than one of the most complicated. The rules of baccarat are a bit complicated of course but in reality we do not actually need to know the rules to play baccarat online. We simply need to choose which of just two hands will win, because the game is totally controlled by the dealer or when it comes to playing online the casino software.

The vast majority of the casino games featured on almost every online casino site are of course slots games in a variety of different forms, and most of those are also relatively easy to play so do we actually need the free play option or is it unnecessary. As online casinos have developed over the years and the casino software designers who are responsible for most of those slots games have become more imaginative, so even many of these new slots games have also become more complicated. Certainly most of the online slots games now look very different from the slot machines most of us grew up playing, and many of them have even more options than the big slot machines in the specialist arcades. A few free spins can therefore be very useful while we get used to the graphics and the multiple winning lines associated with many of these online slots games. Almost all the online casinos now offer the free online casino option on most of their slots games, although some do limit how many times you can play a game free of charge. Clearly the online casino site operators are not making any money if we are simply playing for fun rather than gambling. Some online casinos however have taken a different view and now offer the free play option as the default setting on all of their slots games. Players are able to choose when they start to play for real money rather than being forced to do so. Clearly the operators of these online casinos are guessing that most of their customers enjoy the risk element of playing casino games online and will therefore begin to play for real money sooner rather than later. The free online casino option is an important development and as we have illustrated has a number of different applications depending on which casino games you are playing. Some traditional casino games benefit from the teaching element of the free play option, whereas for the slots games it is probably more useful in finding your way round the graphics.