Monthly Archives: September 2016

We’ve all groaned, moaned and chuckled through health and safety classes at high school. “Remember to put the thing on the thing before doing the thing so you don’t end up with a thing in your thing” and other types of cringeworthy warnings have echoed in classrooms throughout the civilized world and have subsequently been completely ignored. Because at the end of the day, we don’t want to be lectured on stuff like safety, we know this stuff perfectly ourselves, don’t we? We’re adults, goddammit, the last thing we need is someone telling us how to stay safe! We know how to stay safe, hell, it’s in our very DNA! Only an idiot wouldn’t know how to stay safe, right? Well… We all say that, but at the end of the day, thanks to stuff like constant, boring, even downright deprecating health and safety warnings in high schools, the teenage pregnancy rates have dropped significantly. Same goes for stuff like STDs, scams, drug abuse… Hell, even violent crimes have decreased by a significant percentage because people know how to protect themselves from them now. Safety warnings, as annoying and condescending as they are, actually work.

The same goes for online casinos. Sure, nobody actually <i>wants</i> to sit down and read up on how to find a safe online casino, because “Only dumb people get scammed”, “If it’s in Google it’s got to be legitimate” and “This kind of thing would never happen to me”, but honestly, the more I researched this subject before diving into my own online casino adventure, the more I realized that finding a safe online casino is far from the clear cut most people expect it to be. Fraudulent casinos are everywhere, since they’re super easy to produce en masse, super cheap to maintain and even if they’re taken down, they can always pop up again. And if you play in an unsafe, unregulated online casino? Best case scenario, you’ll lose all the money you invest into it. I’m not saying that all the games are necessarily rigged to always make you win, quite the opposite – in fact, many of the games might actually have better odds than average! However, once it’s actually time for the casino to pay up your winnings, there will be delays in the deposit, or a convenient bank error, or worst of all, a “deposit fee” asking you to pay a certain sum in order to get you’re your money transferred. Worst case scenario, you could even go to prison!

So yeah, I don’t think I need to tell you that making sure the casino you’re playing at is legitimate is pretty important. But how do you check? Honestly, it’s a lot easier than you might think, and it only takes a couple of seconds as long as you know what you’re looking for. I mean, if I – who had never in her life touched an online casino until just very recently – could learn how to do it, then you absolutely can too! While the method for verifying sites is different in every country, you mostly need to be looking out for certificates. A good online casino will be certified by the government (such as the Gambling Commission in the UK) and will proudly display that certificate in its footer. Additionally, you should be able to look up said certificate from the Gambling Commission’s site. The best online casinos in the UK are also certified by independent organizations such as eCOGRA, which run tests on the games to make sure they’re not hogging all your hard-earned money! While it always helps to do a little bit of research and figure out what you need to be looking for, if you don’t want to do that, you can always check out some safe online gambling sites which have already been verified by people way smarter than you and I!

So the bottom line is, as annoying as the constant reminders to stay safe are, they serve a purpose and remind you that there’s a reason for their existence. In the casino world, scammers are everywhere, but the good news is that you really don’t need to do all that much to avoid them. Just be vigilant, look out for those certificates, make sure they’re legit and have fun!

Hey, everyone! Wow, it’s been over a month since I started this blog already! Guess I’m finally starting to get the hang of this whole “commitment” thing, huh? Sure, a one-month anniversary isn’t exactly an achievement, unless you’re a clingy fifteen-year-old girl in her very first relationship ever, but it’s actually a pretty big milestone for me, since I can’t really remember committing to anything serious for more than a month or so, outside of stuff like school and my day job. So yay, progress! Anyway, much the aforementioned teenage girl who proceeds to give a gift to her hubby for their one month anniversary and inevitably proceeds to make him very uncomfortable in the process, scaring him off and shortly afterwards ending up single (this is a completely random example and not at all related to my life experience), I, too, decided to commemorate the event with a gift for you guys!

Today, I decided to share a little bit of my experience playing online slots over the past month. Keep in mind that before then, I only knew about slots from movies like “What Happens in Vegas”, and as we all know everything is depicted so accurately in Hollywood, sarcasm mode. But yeah, this was an entirely new journey for me, and the things I found were… Let’s just say, interesting. My first impression of the slots is just how many of them there actually is! I mean, it’s crazy! Most award winning casino sites have hundreds of those things, to the point where it’s a bit overwhelming for a newbie like me! Sure, they promote a couple of the more high-profile slots (most of which are based on pre-existing properties) right there on the front page of the casino, but for the most part you’re left to your own devices to figure out exactly what it is you want to play. And as I said, it can be a bit too much for someone who’s taking her first steps into this sort of thing – you kinda need to learn how to run before you can walk, if you know what I mean.

Still, I didn’t let that deter me! I marched on bravely and realized quite joyfully that the overwhelming majority of the slots allow you to try them out for free with a demo account, which is a pretty great, risk-free way of allowing players to pick their favorites. As such, I relished in the opportunity and tried over fifty different slots. I only played most of them briefly, maybe about a dozen spins or so per slot, but just from that I managed to get the idea that a lot of them are really similar. Don’t get me wrong, the bigger slots (especially the ones that have a brand name behind them) are AWESOME, very different from each other and with lots of unique features, but the smaller, less famous ones seemed almost like they were copied and pasted with slightly different graphics. It was a bit jarring, but I guess every entertainment industry has this problem – I mean, just look at Hollywood, for every good movie in genres like action, comedy or romance there’s a dozen that try to emulate it at the most basic level and fail miserably.

I’m happy to say that at the end of the day I managed to have fun with the slots, and even picked a few which I’ll continue to play for the foreseeable future! If you’re curious which ones, though, I’ll have to disappoint you, since you’ll need to wait until next time to learn my top 3! Patience, young Padawan! … Wait, did they ever say that line in any of the movies? Guess it’s time to take a break from slots and rewatch “Star Wars” instead!