There is a huge range of gambling games available online

Clearly the word ‘gambling’ can be used in many ways, but for our purposes here at gambling.ie we concentrate on just two areas, namely sports gambling and what we usually call casino gambling. Online sports gambling is now offered by all the major bookmakers including the two most popular bookmakers in Ireland, Ladbrokes and Paddy Power and does not need a great deal more explanation than that so we will concentrate on the online casino gambling sector in this article. The term casino gambling is now used to describe any gambling activity associated with playing any of the huge range of gambling games now available online, and not just the gambling games such as roulette and blackjack we have traditionally referred to as casino gambling games because they were available in our real casinos.

All the online casinos available in Ireland do of course offer roulette, blackjack and various forms of poker on their sites, but the biggest effect of the introduction of online casino gambling is to be found in the huge range of what are often referred to as ‘other games’. This is where you will find the gambling games which were never available to us before the online casinos came on stream. The biggest part of this collection of gambling games is of course the slots games and the video slots, and it is here that gambling games enthusiasts will find the greatest variety in terms of the gambling games offered by the different online casino operators. The slots games you will find at an online casino are vastly different from the slot machines in our pubs and clubs, and cover a massive range of themes based on popular television programmes, films, cartoon characters and even sports. Some do not even have the traditional spinning reels, but they all have multiple winning lines and many of them also have rolling jackpots which can reach substantial sums of money. The sheer number of these gambling games makes it impossible to pick out particular games or even types of game, so we will go on to the other gambling games which are now available online.

When looking at the gambling games which we can now play at the online casinos we should probably start with the traditional casino gambling games which were available in many casinos around the world, but not in Ireland. The most obvious example of these gambling games is baccarat, a gambling game found in almost every casino across Europe. Backgammon is another gambling game which most of us have heard of but perhaps never had the opportunity to play, and then there is craps. Visit any American casino and you will find that craps is at least as popular as roulette if not more so, yet most of us have never seen a craps table other than on film. Whilst talking about the traditional gambling games which have now become far more accessible we should not forget poker. Very few of our casinos offered us the opportunity to play poker on a regular basis, and to our knowledge none gave us the option to play any form of poker against the house, but we can now play poker online whenever we want to both against the house for fixed odds and against other players on the specialist poker forums.

The next type of gambling game proving popular at the online casinos are numbers games such as Keno. We should not be surprised of course that numbers games are popular because the game of bingo has had a huge following for many years, only recently suffering a setback as a result of the smoking ban but still very much alive and kicking. Keno is one of a number of gambling games loosely based on bingo and although it does vary a little on different sites the principle is the same. At the All Irish casino for instance the Keno player chooses up to 15 numbers from 1 to 80, hoping to match as many as possible with 15 numbers then randomly selected by the RNG. Keno is played for fixed odds depending on the number of matches, but the odds on each matching number can also be increased by selecting less than 15 numbers so you have the choice of both risk and reward. We should point out that the odds paid out on Keno do vary from site to site so it is worth checking before you play.

Next up in our look at the gambling games to be found in the ‘other games’ section of most online casinos are the scratch cards. Again we should not be surprised how popular gambling on online scratch cards has become because for many people buying a scratch card on the high street has become an almost daily routine along with their newspaper or their lunch. The online scratch cards are very similar to the cards you buy on the high street and pay out according to the number of matching symbols, but unlike the cardboard versions which are generally increasing in price they can be played for very small stakes if you choose. Conversely if you really want to push the boat out Party Casino have a scratch card called Hollywood Stars which allows you to gamble $500 on a single card.

We have already mentioned craps as one of the traditional casino gambling games proving popular online, but here are of course a number of other dice games to be found in the range of gambling games at most online casinos. Craps and Sic Bo are both popular dice gambling games offering multiple betting opportunities, but the range of dice games available online also includes very simple games such as Roll ‘em which require you to predict just the total value of two dice. In fact the range of dice games available at most sites offers many options depending on how much time or thought you wish to apply.

Lastly we should mention the gambling games based on particular sports such as football or horse racing, and if that is not your particular interest how about the gambling games based on popular television programmes such ‘deal or no deal’. There is even a gambling game based on who wants to be a millionaire at Ladbrokes for those who enjoy quizzing.