Casino

If you’ve ever accessed an online casino, you surely noticed that the game library of a vast majority of these sites features slot machines. Not only that, but this is by far the most diverse category as there are hundreds, often thousands of slots to choose from.

The reason why is that online slots are the most popular casino games at all operators. Of course, there are several features which contributed to their popularity and that is what we are going to discuss in this article. Below, we’ve elaborated why are online slots the most popular casino games, so without any further ado, let’s jump into the details.

They Come in Many Variations

First of all, online slots are as diverse and as dynamic as you would think. They can be categorized based on their theme, number of paylines, fixed or adjustable paylines, type of jackpot, payline system, number of reels, bonus features and whatnot.

Some of the slot themes that you can come across are Egyptian slots, Wild West, oceanic, futuristic, space, city nightlife slots, jungle slots, adventurous, etc. When it comes to the type of jackpot, they can either be standard or progressive slots, whereas paylines is where things are interesting the most.

The basic categorization of slots in terms of the paylines is left to right, right to left, or both ways. However, game providers have become extremely innovative recently, which is why they came up with rather unique systems.

NetEnt invented the Cluster Pays system, Big Time Gaming invented Megaways and Megaquads and ReelPlay invented the Infinity Reels system.

Slots are Optimized for Mobile Use

Moving on, in order for a game to be popular and loved by casino games, it needs to be easily accessed. This feature is not a problem for online slots as they are powered by the latest HTML5 technology. This means that players can access them from any mobile or desktop device.

Regardless of whether you choose to play a certain slot on your Android or iOS device, you will be able to enjoy it without any interruptions. Moreover, the mobile gameplay will not differ from the desktop gameplay in any way.

They May Featured Massive Rewards

While speaking about how slots are categorized, we mentioned that when it comes to the jackpot, they can either be standard or progressive. The maximum jackpot in standard slots is fixed, whereas progressive slots have a jackpot whose maximum exposure keeps increasing over time.

The most popular progressive slot is Mega Moolah by Microgaming, a slot that shattered records in terms of jackpots that players have won throughout the years. In April 2021, a new record was set as Absolootly Mad™: Mega Moolah paid out over €19 million to a lucky player.

So, massive rewards are also one of the reasons why online slots are the most popular casino games.

Simple and Fair Gameplay

Of course, before you start playing a slot game, you need to read its rules and get familiar with the paylines, regular and special symbols and in-game bonuses. The guides are usually short and easy to understand.

Once you read them, the gameplay is extremely simple – you just set your desired bet and spin the reels. And if you are wondering whether slots are rigged, the answer is no. These games use Random Number Generators, or simply known as RNGs.

They are AI systems that are in charge of creating random outcomes and making sure that each player has equal chances of winning. The outcome of an online slot is calculated instantly, even though it takes a few seconds for the reels to stop spinning. The spinning reels are just a cool visual that is added to the game.

If you play at crypto casinos, fair-play is increased even more thanks to the concept that these platforms use – provably fair gaming. Both RNGs and provably fair gaming tools are used to promote fair play, but there’s one major difference between the two.

With provably fair gaming, players are actually able to check and verify whether the outcome of the slot round was random and fair.

In-Game Bonuses

Finally, we go to the last feature that online slots have and one that contributes towards them being the most popular casino game and that is in-game bonuses. Some of the features that online slots may have include Wild symbols, free spins, bonus rounds, Bonus Buy, mystery and expanding symbols, Tumble feature, Cascading Reels, etc.

All of these bonus features can help the player form wins easier and since they contribute to the exciting gameplay, it’s no wonder why players adore them so much.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, online slots have tons of great features, all of which make these games fun to play. The fun, combined with the easy accessibility create the perfect recipe for a quality gaming experience and that is why these games are considered the most popular at every online casino.

At the moment, there are thousands of online casinos on the global market. Each online casino has its own great features, and they do everything they can to attract new players to their platforms, even though the number of online casino players is ever-growing. A majority of these sites are licensed and regulated, but there are scammers that use their reputation to try and rob people of their money.

Since online scams are almost impossible to be tracked, authorities do not have leverage over scammers. That is why, as a player, you have a huge responsibility to make sure that you choose a reliable operator if you are looking for a decent casino gaming experience. With that being said, we are going to help you find out how to choose a trusted online casino by listing a few things that you should always check.

Check for Its License

First of all, in order for online casinos to offer their services to players legally, they need to be licensed by either a domestic or international authority. Players in countries where there aren’t any specific domestic authorities need to rely on international regulators. Some of the world’s most respected international commissions are the UKGC, MGA, Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner and Curacao eGaming.

A license indicates that the casino is trustworthy and reliable and checking for a license is extremely simple. Access the official website of the online casino, scroll down to the bottom of the home page and see whether the license information is displayed in the footer. Then, go to the official site of the authority and double-check the info.
If it checks out, then that means that the activities of the casino are overseen and regulated.

Take a Peek at The Bonuses and Promotions

The second indicator that will show you whether the site is legal and not a scam are the bonuses and promotions. As you may know, every online casino offers various offers to its registered players. That includes welcome bonuses, free spins, cashbacks, loyalty programs, reload bonuses, and so on.

Take a look at these bonuses and see how rewarding they are and how easy it is to claim them. You can do that by reading the terms and conditions of the bonus. If they are just simply too good to be true, then it is likely that the casino is in shady business and that means that you should not engage with it.

Bonuses and promotions are the number 1 way through which casinos attract players and logically, the more rewarding they are, the higher the chances of the players registering at their platforms will be. However, they cannot make them too gracious as casinos won’t be able to turn in a profit.

Make Sure the Site is Secured

Finally, in order to play the featured games for real money and claim deposit bonuses, you will have to deposit funds to your account using one of the accepted methods. That means that you will have to provide the casino with sensitive information about yourself.

The same thing applies to registering when it comes to providing the site with sensitive data. That is why you must make sure that the operator is secure. Now, if it holds a valid license, then the chances are high that the operator utilizes modern security software but checking this will only take a few seconds of your time and that is why it’s worth including it.

All you have to do is take a look at the casino’s URL. At the start, you will see that the URL starts with “HTTP”. What you’re looking for, is the letter “S” next to “HTTP”. If the letter is featured there and the URL starts with “HTTPS” then the site utilizes the latest SSL encryption software and is safe to register.

If not, then you should not register or deposit money there as the site is not safe.

How to Increase Your Chances of a Decent Gaming Experience?

Being secure at online casinos is of major importance, but if you want to have a decent gaming experience, you are also ought to check the game library of the casino. The more diverse it is, the better, as you will have plenty of games to choose from.

You should always look for slots, Poker games, Baccarat, Blackjack, Roulette and live dealer games. See if they utilize the latest HTML5 technology as it will indicate if they are optimized for mobile use. Moreover, you should check the list of game providers that supplied the online casino.

The more reputable the brands are, the higher the quality of the games will be. Some of the world’s most well-known brands are NetEnt, Pragmatic Play, Yggdrasil, Play’n GO, Microgaming, Playson, Habanero and Red Tiger. All of these companies supply casinos with cutting-edge casino games with many in-game bonuses.

It’s not exactly a secret that I’ve been involved in organizing several gambling events for charity in the past, and by “several” I mean “three”… But hey, I bet that’s three more than the overwhelming majority of people have experience with! I was never really the sole organizer for any of these events – hell, I wasn’t even the main organizer for most of them! I was just a guy who helped out with the organization and also acted as a dealer, which is always LOADS of fun (seriously, if you guys have never played dealer for strangers, I recommend that you try it if you have the opportunity). That all changed in April of 2016, when the absolutely lovely Richard and Amelia Grayson – the two wonderful, amazing people behind ADADA – invited me to organize an event for them. In case you haven’t heard of ADADA before, it’s basically a non-profit organization which sets to fund UK online casinos that have a unique vision. I mean, sure, objectively speaking the Graysons’ work isn’t as important as, say, feeding starving children in Africa, but it is one they wholeheartedly believe in and are extremely passionate about – not to mention, they clearly know what they’re doing, judging by the myriad of online casinos they’ve already helped launch. Hell, you might have already stumbled onto at least one!

So, enough of the introduction! What’s the event about? Well, the Graysons decided to go with a blackjack night – several tables, staffed by one of us (and a few volunteers). Players would buy chips that they could use to play against the dealers, and if they won, they could donate their chips, and we’d write that amount as their donation, and if they ended up losing, the original amount they used to buy their chips with would be their donation. Of course, that was easier said than done – I mean, it’s not like Wikihow teaches you how to run a charity event properly, as much as it tries. Even someone as experienced as me pretty much had to wing it and deal with problems one at a time, as they arose. (Un)surprisingly, you can’t just start a gambling den in someone’s basement, even if it’s for charity. You need to apply for a license with the Gambling Commission, and then wait to be researched and approved before you can do anything… If you want to be legal, that is.

Once you clear all the legal hurdles (which wasn’t exactly easy, but I’m not going to bore you with all those details) we had to actually sit down and organize the actual event. Richard and Amelia took care of stuff like decorations, invitations, that kind of thing, leaving me with the design of the night. I took inspiration from many of the sites I found on this online blackjack website, deciding that user accessibility was going to be my priority. As a result, had to take some very special care when it came to designing the actual experience that each of our charitable gamblers was going to go through when they entered our small, made-up casino. My decision was that they would be greeted by the blackjack tables (arranged in a semi-circle) pretty much as soon as they entered the hall with their chips, almost like an invitation. You know how in online casinos you always see the games immediately after you log in? I wanted to recreate that experience subtly, without shoving anything in people’s faces.

Suffice to say, the event actually turned out to be quite successful. I’m afraid I can’t disclose just how much money we managed to raise, but the Graysons and I are now considering turning our blackjack night for charity into an annual tradition. And honestly, I wouldn’t mind! Who knows if it’ll happen, but if it does, I’m going to be absolutely into it, 100%! I’ll let you know next year!

I think we can both agree on one thing – games are awesome! Whether they’re videogames, casino games, board games or card games, they’re some of the most fun activities that you can possibly have in your life. I assure you, there’s nothing quite like relaxing with a controller at the end of a long day at work, and I probably don’t need to tell you that getting a few spins on your favorite online slot every now and then is pretty great. But these activities are for relaxation purposes only – they’re meant to entertain you, provide you with a bit of fun every once in a while, they can’t possibly help anyone… Or can they? Make sure you’re sitting tight, because I’m about to blow your mind!

Enter Extra Life – a charity organization that allows you to play games and help out a children’s hospital in the process! Basically, it works like this – one day of the month (November 5th for 2016) is officially labeled Extra Life Day. On it, you’re encouraged to stream yourself playing games for 24 hours straight (though you don’t have to do the full 24 hours, or you can swap with a partner from time to time). For those of you unfamiliar with the term, streaming is when you do a live broadcast of yourself (featuring your screen and sometimes your face) while playing games so that others can watch you play. Your spectators can leave comments on your game and you can interact with them, sometimes even letting them influence your game (this was taken to the extreme in “Twitch Plays Pokemon”, where a streamer gave the people watching the game full control over his game of Pokemon). It’s most commonly done with videogames, but really, you can stream any kind of game! Streaming yourself gambling online is just as easy as streaming yourself playing a game, and using an app such as Periscope you can stream directly from your phone’s camera to show yourself playing a board game or something like that.

Now, where does the charity aspect fall into this? Well, before you start streaming, you can pick a hospital from a huge list of them, located all over the US and Canada (sadly, international hospitals aren’t supported, but there’s nothing stopping you from setting something up on your own outside of Extra Life). Next, when you start streaming you’ll be given a link that you can place on your screen, or send out to the people watching you. When they go to that link, your viewers can donate to the hospital of your choice in your name to support you during your gaming marathon. It’s not exactly simple to set up, and you might need to jump a few hoops in order to get everything going, but overall, “Extra Life” is an absolutely phenomenal way to do what you love while supporting children who need your help. And ultimately, there are few things better than that in the world.

Every self-respected online gambler has tried online casino at least once. I mean, how could we not, it’s awesome! Online casino was originally sold to us with the promise that we were no longer restricted to physical casinos, we could play slots, blackjack and roulette wherever we are, but it wasn’t until mobile casino became as big as it did that this promise was finally fulfilled. As long as you had access to wi-fi or a 3G or 4G network, you could, quite literally, play wherever you were, no questions asked! Wanna spin some slots while waiting for the bus? Done! Wanna bet on red in the dentist’s office? Boom! Mobile casino is pretty much every casino lover’s wet dream… At least in theory. In practice, there are a few issues, the largest of which being that most online casinos tend to be pretty limited.

Online casinos have dozens upon dozens of slots, and so many variations of roulette, blackjack and other games that there’s literally no way you couldn’t find at least one or two which are perfect for you. Mobile casino, on the other hand, doesn’t usually have more than 100 slots and one or two version of the more popular games. A single look at a list of mobile online casinos is enough to prove that pretty clearly. Of course, that’s still not a small amount, but one has to wonder where that discrepancy comes from. On one hand, we’ve got the technical limitations. Most online slots these days are programmed on HTML-5, which is an awesome programming language for web apps and is used by many of the most popular websites, such as YouTube and Facebook. However, as with any programming language, it’s not directly compatible with mobile devices – you can’t just open up something constructed on HTML-5 on something other than your computer, since it wasn’t built to do that. As such, most, if not all casino games need to be rebuilt from the grounds up on a different programming language which has been specifically designed to be compatible with the mobile platform, and that can be a messy process. Some languages only work on Android, others only on Apple. If you ever see a game that’s only available on one platform, this is why.

And then there’s other issues, such as redesigning the slot with the mobile platform in mind. Sometimes the interface needs to be changed in order to accommodate the touch screen. The developers also need to take into account the large variety of mobile devices – a slot they build for mobile must be compatible with a large variety of devices, from phones to tablets. And let us not forget about licensing issues – sometimes, when a certain property is licensed for a slot, the license only applies for online casinos, with physical and mobile requiring separate deals. Overall, there’s a whole lot of little details that go into the crafting of each slot for mobile, so instead of attacking the providers and questioning just why the amount of games on mobile isn’t as large as that on desktop, we should be rather grateful that we’re getting as many mobile games as we are.

Thousands of years ago, the arena was the most prolific place for gamblers and bettors to cast their votes and back them up with money in the hopes that they would, perhaps, become rich. Not only the Colosseum, but arenas all around the world were the dwellings of bookmakers of all kinds who took bets on real people’s lives. Blood spilled on the sand signified that one man would lose their bet and another would become rich. While gladiatorial combat rarely ended in death, it was often precisely the battles to the bitter end which attracted the most bets. Bettors and gamblers alike profited from the death of others… So now, in 2016, I think it’s time this turned around. I believe that we should start using the profits we gained in order to do the opposite of what our ancestors did – keep people alive.

The Gamblers Arena is a non-profit organization with only one goal – to highly encourage gamblers and bettors alike to donate part or all of their winnings to charity. We’ve all thought of what we’d do if we hit the jackpot – buy a nice car, maybe a mansion, move to [insert favorite city here], but do we really need those things? No, we don’t. As a matter of fact, the overwhelming majority of people who won large sums are miserable. Meanwhile, there are people out there who could actually really use this money, and not on things such as cars and the latest technology, but on essentials like food, clean water, shelter and clothes.

The Gamblers Arena is here to encourage gamblers everywhere to donate their casino earnings to charity. We will provide you with a list trustworthy, verified charities that actually help people and don’t just “raise awareness” while pocketing most of the donations. If you win $20,000, your life may not change significantly, but the same amount of money may save hundreds of people.