Davoice - How much can you make with a online casino

I have seen the tournaments with hundreds if not thousands of poker players. I myself like to play blackjack but a good poker game is never out of the question. I have recently been shocked with the number of interviews I have seen with normal people who make not just a living but a really good six digit living playing at a online casino. As the internet becomes larger and larger the business' keep getting plentiful.

Online casinos let you play for real money, and most of them let you play for free with fake money, hoping you'll decide to eventually gamble with real money. They offer traditional casino games like blackjack, craps, baccarat, roulette, slot machines, and even poker against other human players. To play with real money, you make a deposit with a service like eWalletXpress, which is kind of like PayPal for online casinos. At most casinos you can either download their special software to play the games, or play the Flash versions right in your web browser. (Bodog has a good selection of play-in-browser games, and you can play for free without risking any actual money.)

There are hundreds of online casinos, but almost all of them are based on one of a dozen or so software platforms (e.g., Microgaming, Playtech, Real Time Gaming), which is why you may notice striking similarities if you play at more than one casino. Most casino software won't run on Macs, but Bodog's play-in-browser games run fine under MacOS. There's more on this on our page about playing online with a Mac.

As Homer Simpson once said, "That's for the courts to decide." The short answer is that gambling online is perfectly legal for most U.S. players. What's not legal is for your bank to process online gaming transactions, but that's their problem, not yours. Our favorite write-up of this matter is from Casino Player magazine:

The bottom line, as we've been writing since 1997, is that if a U.S. resident wants to gamble online, he or she will be able to, despite any laws that Congress passes to prohibit the activity. It's clear the end user (the player) will not be prosecuted, and since most online gambling companies are located offshore and overseas, many by non-U.S. companies, the action will always be there for U.S. gamblers. [CP, Dec. 2002, p. 48]

Yes, that's dated 2002, and yes, there was a new law passed in 2006, but that law governs banks, not players. It does nothing to criminalize actually playing the games. So far as we know, nobody has ever been prosecuted under U.S. law for simply gambling at an online casino or poker room. The government's efforts so far have been directed at the businesses involved and not the individual players. In the press release for its "60 Minutes" Nov. 20, 2005 program on Internet gambling, CBS said, "U.S. authorities have never prosecuted individual bettors and don't plan to start."

Note that while federal law doesn't prohibit online gambling, your state law might. Gambling-Law-US.com examines the gambling laws in all the U.S. states. The Las Vegas Advisor has info about that too.

In any event, online gambling is already so common that it's unlikely that U.S. or state governments can do much to stop individuals from doing it. Online casinos are doing a brisk business with U.S. customers for this reason. Also, please note that I'm a layperson, not a lawyer, so god help you if you rely on this article as the final word on gambling law, rather than checking the laws in your jurisdiction or consulting an attorney.

Most casinos don't cheat because they'd make less money that way, because they'd never get any repeat business -- not to mention that getting a bad reputation in this business can easily kill an online operation. There's way more money to be made by dealing an honest game. A casino winds up making less money if it cheats, so cheating is rare. It's also hard to get away with, since watchdog mathematicians like the Wizard of Odds don't hesitate to call out casinos which don't deal a fair game.

Of course there are exceptions, like Casino Bar which had a crooked blackjack game. (They were quickly ousted by the Wizard, and their business quickly dried up.) But cheating casinos are the exception and not the rule. In fact, the bigger problem with online casinos is that sometimes they take a long time to pay out a player's winnings -- or in the case of a big win they might try to claim so loophole to avoid paying he player at all. And if this happens to you then you're usually out of luck, since online gaming is largely unregulated and there's no one you can complain to.

Fortunately there's an easy way to avoid getting burned online: Just play at a reputable casino. I recommend Bodog, because they've never failed to pay me, and payout complaints about them from my readers are exceptionally rare (and usually quickly resolved).

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