The traditional online casino games are still almost as popular as the slots

There is no doubt that the internet has dramatically changed almost everything we do in our daily lives. Walk into any office and almost every desk will have a computer screen. Very few businesses do not have an internet presence of some kind, and almost every major high street retailer now does at least as much business online as they do through their stores. The same applies to all the companies now involved in the online gambling sector where the major high street bookmakers are also seeing their online gambling turnover outstrip the betting volumes through their betting shops. The online gambling sector has also seen the arrival of a number of internet only companies, in much the same way as online retail companies such as Amazon are competing strongly in the internet retail sector. Here at onlinecasino.ie we have been fascinated by how quickly gambling enthusiasts have taken to the idea of gambling online rather than through a betting shop or even at a real casino or bingo club. Playing casino games at an online casino in particular has grown ever more popular every year since we were first introduced to the idea of being able to play casino games online. Some would say that the introduction of online casino gambling was not necessarily a planned development when the first gambling games were added to the big online sports gambling sites operated by the big bookmakers, but whether deliberate or not it has certainly been a success. There are probably many reasons why online gambling has been as successful as online retailing, but one of the most obvious is the massively increased choices we are able to enjoy at an online gambling site when compared to the land based alternatives. The number of different sports and sporting events available at any of the online sports gambling sites is clearly far greater than anything readily available at any of our betting shops, but the biggest increase in gambling options provided by the online gambling site operators is in the number of gambling games they have made available for us to enjoy. Nowadays we tend to lump all the gambling games we can access at an online casino under the heading casino games, even though the majority of them were never really available in land based casinos, certainly not here in Ireland. Most of the casino games we can now play online are of course slots games in various forms, and although some Irish casinos did feature a few slot machines it was only the big American casinos which had the floor space to remotely compete with the range of slots games now available at almost every online casino. It was however not just the slots games which helped the online casino operators to attract a new audience, the traditional casino games such as roulette and blackjack were also very popular online.

Clearly there were already many casino games enthusiasts in Ireland who regularly played roulette and blackjack at a real casino, and were therefore easily persuaded to try playing them at an online casino. The biggest appeal of the online casinos for this group of existing fans was however not the accessibility of the traditional casino games such as roulette and blackjack, it was the fact that the online casinos also offered them the opportunity to play other traditional casino games such as baccarat, backgammon and even craps. None of these very popular traditional casino games were never regularly available in Irish casinos because most of them did not have the floor space necessary to offer them in addition to roulette and blackjack. These traditional casino games were only available on the continent or of course in American casinos, so Irish casino games fans rarely had the opportunity to play them before they became available online. Backgammon is of course a casino game which requires an element of skill and experience to play successfully, but craps and even baccarat do not take much learning. Those who have never had the opportunity to play baccarat may well be surprised by that statement, because it has acquired a reputation for being an extremely complicated game usually only played by high rollers in the side rooms of the big casinos. Now that we can all play baccarat online however we can all see that its reputation is a bit of a myth. The rules of baccarat are somewhat complicated, but anyone playing baccarat online does not need to know them because the game is totally controlled by the dealer. In fact playing baccarat only requires us to predict which of just two hands will win the game. Apart from the rare situation where the two hands are tied, playing baccarat is no more difficult than predicting the toss of a coin. There is one other traditional casino games which we must mention when it comes to examining the success of online casinos, and that is the game of poker. Of all the traditional casino games which are now readily accessible online, it is the game of poker which has seen the greatest increase in popularity. Poker is of course not a new game and many of us will remember that almost all the westerns we used to watch at our local cinema featured a saloon scene with characters playing 5-card draw poker. That was also the form of poker played on the Mississippi river boats at the time and in the gold fields of the far west of America, but it is no longer the most popular version of the game. Nowadays serious poker players will almost certainly concentrate their efforts on playing Texas Hold’em poker, because almost every poker tournament and the specialist poker platforms which have been set up online all use the Texas Hopld’em version of the game. Texas Hold’em uses five what are called community cards which are dealt face up into the middle of the poker table, and can be used by all the players in addition to their two hole cards to make up their showdown hand. This creates bigger pots and potentially better hands, which is why it is so popular.