Give thought to your choice of online casino deposit option

Very few things in life are free, and playing casino games at an online casino is no exception. There are of course a number of free play options at almost every online casino on our recommended list but they are there primarily to encourage us to try as many different casino games as possible before starting to play for real money rather than offering us the option to continue to play free of charge. The whole concept of playing casino games, whether online or at a real casino or bingo club is that it is not as much fun if there is no element of risk, so at some time we will inevitably have to choose how we want to fund playing our favourite casino games. Every online casino offers a very wide choice of different deposit options, and they clearly hope that there will be at least one of those deposit options to suit all their prospective customers. Certainly almost every one of these online casino sites provide a satisfactory and comprehensive range of options, but we have to be clear that some of those options may not prove to be the best way to fund an online casino account as far as costs are concerned. We have all now become relatively well versed in the best ways to purchase goods and services online, and for a variety of reasons many of us automatically reach for a credit card for that sort of financial transaction online, but do those same considerations apply to funding an online casino account. The answer to that is almost certainly no, because there is no risk of receiving shoddy goods or even poor service from an online casino. The only risk is that you are unlucky and lose money when playing the casino games and that is not reclaimable under any circumstances, so the insurance element of using a credit card for online transactions is irrelevant. Not only that but using a credit card for anything involving gambling will almost certainly result in a penalty charge being applied by the card issuer. The banks do not like us using their credit cards to provide money for gambling and express that dislike by charging us extra money for any transaction of that sort. That extra surcharge is often at least 2% of the value of the transaction, and can be even higher with some banks. Trying to win money by playing casino games is hard enough already without starting with a fund 2% less than it could be.

Having established that a credit card is at the very least a costly way to fund playing casino games online, what about the other common deposit options offered by most online casinos. We could of course use a debit card to fund our online casino account, and that certainly removes the objection to the idea of gambling with borrowed money because using a debit card does not allow you to gamble with more than you have in your account, but some Irish debit cards are processed through the same systems as credit cards and will therefore also incur additional charges even though in this case they are probably unwarranted. We have therefore discounted both credit cards and debit cards from the list of preferential online casino deposit options, so let’s move on to the better alternatives. Before we discount any form of plastic we should look at using a pre-loaded card as a deposit option. These cards operate in much the same way as the pre-loaded currency cards many of us use when travelling abroad on holiday or even on business. You simply load a certain amount of money onto the card and use it in the same way as you would use a credit or debit card. Ucash and PaySafe are two such pre-loaded cards which are accepted as a deposit option by many online casinos and they have the advantage that they can also be used to assist in keeping to a budget when things are going wrong because it gives you time to reconsider when thinking of loading more money onto the card if you are having a run of bad luck.

We now come to what many people would argue is by far the best of the online casino deposit options offered by the online casinos, and that is an e-wallet. An e-wallet is a separate bank account which can be used for a wide variety of internet transactions including of course funding an online casino account. There are several advantages in using an e-wallet such as Pay Pal for this purpose, but the most significant is that it gives you far more security and privacy than most other deposit options. First and foremost you bank will not know what you are doing with your e-wallet account, nor will the online casino site operator have access to any of your primary banking details. Again using an e-wallet as an online casino deposit option should also make it easier for you to control your gambling budget because you would have to make a conscious decision to put more money into the account, therefore hopefully deterring you from chasing losses. We all know that the biggest reason why any form of gambling can cease to be fun is when we are tempted into chasing our losses following a run of bad luck. Anything that helps us to control our gambling budget can only be a good thing. Before we finish discussing the best and worst online casino deposit options we have to mention what could indeed be the best choice out of all the options we are presented with. Both Ladbrokes and Paddy Power allow their Irish customers to manage their online accounts using cash at one of their high street betting shops. That arrangement includes managing an online casino account as well as a sports gambling account. Let’s face it there is no more secure or private way to fund any form of gambling than using cash.