In my years of involvement with the Internet gambling business, I've come to the conclusion that there are three types of people who become casino operators. The first type is those who understand Internet technology and the casino business. A prime example of that is Global Player Casino, which is, without a doubt, the most innovative company in the business today. Also, companies like Cryptologic, Microgaming and Real Time Gaming obviously understand the business very well, although some of their franchisees occasionally leave something to be desired in that area. However, the tight controls placed upon them by the software manufacturers keep most of the casino operators out of trouble.

The second type of person (or company) to get involved in Internet gambling is the one who understands casino gambling, but knows very little about Internet technology. For proof of that, just go to Harrah's "play for fun" casino. Admittedly, they use software that was developed by an Internet casino company, Chartwell, but one look at what they offer tells me that this site was developed by some part of Harrah's that isn't directly involved with their brick-and-mortar casino operations. They have a steep learning curve ahead of them, but I think they'll eventually get it right.

My last category is the amateur. This is a person or company with more money than sense and I'm of the opinion that we don't need any more of them in the business. Most of the recent problems online gamblers have had were evidently caused by these amateurs. I can picture it all now:

Fred and Joe are two friends who go to Vegas 3 or 4 times a year and one day, Joe gets an e-mail with a message, "Own A Casino". The message goes on to tell Joe that, "it's easy" and "we take care of everything" and all he has to do is "market your casino". Sounds simple, doesn't it? So, Joe tells Fred and they pony up $25,000 or more (or less) and they now have a site that no one knows about. But "proven" marketing methods are available to them, so we start seeing posts on the message boards like, "Yippee! I played at XYZ Casino last night and turned the free $20 they gave me into $15,000! They also offer great customer service and quick payouts". Like all of us are too stupid to understand that this is just spamming.

Well, that doesn't work, so they offer a 25% bonus for everybody who makes a deposit this week. Sure, they get a lot of new customers, but then the customers start cashing out and guess what? The total $$$ in the check requests exceed the $$$ the promo brought in. Now Fred and Joe have a cash-flow problem. If this sounds like what happened at Players Fortune and the Gambling Software.com debacle, you would be correct in your assumption. It may also be what happened with the Tropika-owned casinos. (See our Blacklist Page for more details.) So here we go again: players who have put their trust and hard-earned $$$ into an operation get screwed because a couple of guys who don't understand this business thought they had found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

But those aren't the only ones who are victimizing the players. Lately there have been a lot of new casino software developers popping up and their lack of experience is obvious. Take Clock Media, for example. They opened a casino (A Sure Bet Casino, currently on our Blacklist) and offered a game called "Bare All Blackjack". This is a version of Double Exposure Blackjack where the dealer's hole card is shown. In exchange for that, the dealer wins all ties and normally other playing restrictions apply. The game developer obviously has no experience in this business worth talking about, because all he did was to take their single-deck Blackjack game, set it up so that the dealer's hole card was shown and the dealer won all ties. Those rules gave the basic strategy player a 3.5% edge over the casino! How can this person say he knows the casino business? From what I gather, he had been employed as the marketing manager of Avatar Casino, but that obviously didn't make him an expert in this business. Anyway, we wrote about this game and, as you might expect, a lot of readers signed up there to play. Within hours, the game was taken down and after it was back up, it became obvious to anyone with a shred of understanding about probability statistics that something was wrong. Players were screwed out of hundreds of $$$ by this new game and all the casino owner could say was, "I don't know what happened". Players are still owed $$$ by this operation, which is why they're on our Blacklist.

For what it's worth, here's some advice from someone who has been involved with this since 1995: If you don't have experience in both Internet technology and the casino business, do yourself a favor and stay out. This is a tough business and the players are tired of being ripped off.

-the GameMaster