Online casinos have given us a huge choice of casino games

One of the most obvious effects of the internet on our daily lives is the huge increase in choice it has given us. Not only that but those choices are far more accessible than they have ever been. Gone are the days when we had to tramp round all the high street stores to see what was on offer or to find a specific product we needed, we can now access almost every potential supplier with just a few clicks of the mouse. Not everybody enjoys internet shopping of course, and browsing the high street is still a popular leisure activity for many people on the weekends. It is also true that many of us need to see and touch a product before we are happy that it meets our requirements and we are ready to buy it, so the internet will probably never totally replace the high street for shopping even if it does offer far more choice. The same applies to online gambling, which again offers us more choices than we have ever had before but is unlikely to totally replace the betting shop for sports gambling or the real casino or bingo club for fans of playing casino games. When the big bookmakers set up the first online sports gambling sites, the most obvious difference between gambling online or through our high street betting shop was the huge range of sports we were able to follow online, and of course the fact that we could now bet on sporting events taking place almost anywhere in the world. Sporting seasons no longer existed when it came to online sports gambling. When those same online sports gambling site operators started to add a few casino games to their sites, our gambling options increased still further. In fact the speed with which the online casino site operators added more and more casino games to their sites was quite remarkable, and most of those first online casinos were quickly offering well over a hundred different casino games for us to enjoy. Although most of the online casino games we can now play are slots games in a variety of forms, the traditional casino games also played an important part in the success of online casinos. The ever popular traditional casino games of roulette and blackjack clearly attracted regular visitors to our real casinos because they could now play these games without the hassle of actually getting to the nearest casino, which was often not that easy for many people. Most of Ireland’s real casinos were also relatively small and therefore lacked the floor space to offer any of the other traditional casino games which were popular in other parts of the world. Traditional casino games such as craps, baccarat and even backgammon were suddenly available to play at the online casinos, whereas few if any of our real casinos featured these games. Another of the online casino games which immediately appealed to an existing fan base was of course bingo. Although our high street bingo clubs had clearly seen a drop in attendance since the introduction of the smoking ban, there is no doubt that the actual game of bingo never lost its appeal. When the online casino sites started to feature a variety of numbers games based on the concept of bingo, they were immediately popular among those of us who used to regularly go to the bingo. Traditional casino games fans and the bingo enthusiasts were among the first to start playing their favourite casino games online, and clearly played a large part in the success of online casinos. Here at onlinecasino.ie we have watched this rapid expansion of those first online casino sites, and regularly reported on the continually increasing range of slots games they were introducing, but we now also have a whole new type of online casino to enjoy.

Most of the first online casinos were and still are part of much larger online sports gambling sites operated by the big bookmakers, but the online casino sector has now been joined by a number of specialist online casino operators which only offer their customers a range of online casino games to enjoy, with no attempt to get involved in sports gambling. These new online casinos have introduced us to a whole new range of slots games in particular, because they have used different casino software suppliers to provide their range of games. The slots games which are featured on every online casino are designed by specialist casino software companies, and in the early days one or two of those companies were able to establish a dominant position in the sector which unfortunately led to some identical slots games being featured on several sites. That situation still exists, but the new online casinos have greatly improved the range of slots games we can now play online. Before we leave the subject of online slots games we need to stress that most online slots games are unrecognisable from the games we were used to on the slot machines in our pubs and clubs, with as many as five reels and any number of winning lines on each spin. Some do not have reels at all and feature falling blocks instead. Real slot machine enthusiasts however have been catered for at CasinoCasino where you will find many of the iconic Amatic Industries slots games online for the first time.

There is one other traditional casino game which we should mention in any discussion about online casino games, and that is the game of poker. Prior to the introduction of online casinos, poker had almost faded from our memory and was very rarely played apart from during professional poker tournaments. Nowadays however poker, particularly Texas Hold’em poker is one of the most popular online casino games and even has specialist online poker platforms where serious poker enthusiasts can test their skills against like-minded fans from across the world. Every online casino also now offers a range of poker formats which can be played against the house, so playing poker is again a popular leisure enjoyed by a wide range of people.