Gambling is a part of all our lives in one form or another

Here at gambling.ie we usually tend to concentrate on the practicalities of gambling online in an effort to help new online sports gambling or casino gambling customers enjoy the experience as much as possible. So for a change we thought we would take a look at how gambling in all its forms fits into the modern world. The very word ‘gambling’ has a variety of meanings depending on how it is used. For example we often comment on the tendency for the banks to apply surcharges on the use of credit cards as an online gambling account deposit option, presumably justified by a dislike of gambling, yet as we are all very much aware nowadays the biggest contributor to many of the banks’ profits is the performance of their investment arms, or what has become known as casino banking. Whilst it is of course perfectly legitimate to criticise the high risk financial gambling which contributed in part to the downfall of the banks, it is worth considering that a great many of us also rely on financial gambling quite apart from any casino gambling we do. Anyone with a personal pension for example is gambling on the performance of the pension fund managers and the boards of the companies they invest in to secure their future income when they retire. Many of us enjoy sports gambling and there is no doubt that a good number of sports gambling fans are following the Winter Olympics in Sochi, but these games also highlight another form of gambling which appears to be part of human nature, with often much higher stakes than simply money. Anyone watching the participants of some of these winter sports will realise that many of them are gambling with their lives or at the very least their health. The increasing popularity of extreme sports from bungie jumping to sky diving demonstrates very clearly that human beings will always be gamblers in one form or another.