The Casino Wave

When I visited Monte Carlo, Monaco a few weeks ago I ran into an old colleague, we had been in the same card counting team almost twenty years ago, we sat down at Havana Café and we discussed old memories, she had spent all the time since we met the last time at the Blackjack tables in Atlantic City, US, while I had spent my time at the European casinos. After half an hour of old memories we slided in to how the casino world has developed since it went online.

A business, a world going online usually make things easier, but the question is if it really has with the online gambling business. For starters it is not that easy to protect yourself against credit card fraud and rigged games and to kill a myth, when I’m writing this (December 2005) it doesn’t exist any kind of authority to control the online casinos.

But that’s not the most important. What you really should ask yourself is if gambling really is more available than it was fifteen years ago, when the online casino world began to develop. More people then ever are of course gambling, but is that really because of the dotcom industry? What I mean is that gambling has always been available to every one and that regardsless of the fact that there are really few “real” casinos in Europe, there have always been exceptions to the non-gambling laws, everything from the restaurant casinos in Germany to the Jack Vegas slot machines in Sweden, and Monte Carlo is never to far away.

I’m referring to the fact that you can always, and always could gamble, but it’s first when the online gambling business came that people are doing it. Politician all over the world explains this with that the easier it is to gamble, the more people are gambling.

I who have been in this business for twenty years, know that that isn’t the answer. I would say that this actually a proof of how easy manipulated we humans are. The reason I disagree with the politicians is of course because the online gambling business actually never did that well until the beginning of 2003, 13 years after the first casino went online. There for, the reason more people are gambling than ever is not because of the availability, it’s because of the online marketing methods they are using.

And then the press should have it’s piece of the criticism, when it suddenly became cool to make your living out of poker then every kid sat behind the computer for hours, trying to become a pro.

But the ones who cannot be blamed enough is the politicians all over the world with their disgusting moral. If the casinos had not been forbidden world wide there wouldn’t be any online casinos, a censureship of these casinos would of course be restrictions in our democracy, but something has to be done, and since politicians refuse to give people the right to gamble on a real casino without the risk of getting your credit card stolen or without the risk of rigged games, they all refuse to let the casinos in, but if you want to get poor and manipulated, please do as every one else, go with the casino wave.