When I visited Monte Carlo, Monaco a few weeks ago I ran into an old colleague, we had been on the same card counting team almost twenty years ago, we sat in Havana Café and discussed old memories, she had spent the entire time since we met for the last time at the Blackjack tables in Atlantic City, USA, while I spent my time in European casinos. After half an hour of old memories, we move on to see how the world of casinos has developed since it went online.
A business, an online world usually makes things easier, but the question is whether it is really so with the online gambling business. To begin with, it is not that easy to protect yourself against credit card fraud and rigged games and to bust a myth, as I write this (December 2005) there is no authority whatsoever to control online casinos.
But that’s not important. What you should really be asking yourself is if the game is really more widely available than it was fifteen years ago when the world of online casinos first started to develop. Sure, more people than ever are gambling, but is that really because of the dot-com industry? What I want to say is that gambling has always been available to everyone and that, regardless of the fact that there are very few “real” casinos in Europe, there have always been exceptions to the laws prohibiting gambling, from restaurant casinos in Germany. to Jack Vegas slots in Sweden, and Monte Carlo is never too far away.
I mean the fact that you can always, and you always can gamble, but it’s first when the online gambling business came about that people are doing it. Politicians around the world explain this by saying that the easier it is to bet, the more people bet.
I, who have been in this business for twenty years, know that this is not the answer. I’d say this is actually proof of how easy we humans are to manipulate. The reason I disagree with the politicians is, of course, that the online gambling business never did so well until early 2003, 13 years after the first casino went online. So the reason more people are betting than ever before is not because of availability, but because of the online marketing methods they are using.
And then the press should have their share of the criticism, when it suddenly became cool to make a living at poker and all the kids sat behind the computer for hours, trying to become pros.
But the ones who cannot be blamed enough are the politicians around the world with their disgusting morals. If casinos hadn’t been banned all over the world, there would be no online casinos, censorship of these casinos would of course be restrictions on our democracy, but something has to be done, and since politicians refuse to give people the right to play in a real casino without the risk of having their credit card stolen or without the risk of rigged games, everyone refuses to let casinos in, but if you want to impoverish yourself and manipulate yourself, do like everyone else , go with the wave casino