Free Online Casino

One of the hottest new Internet trends is playing free online casino games. Poker, roulette, blackjack, they’re all easy to find. There are some things to look out for however, to protect yourself and to have the best possible playing experience.

History of Online Casinos

The first online casino was Internet Casinos Inc. (ICI), debuting in 1995. It was an immediate success. Just a little earlier, Intertops had opened a sports book service. They soon opened a full-fledged casino as well, followed by The Gaming Club. These early games were legitimate, operated in an aboveboard manner, and gained a wide following. Online casinos grew fairly slowly, as online services go, until about the year 2000; this was the year they really exploded.

Today, online casinos tend to be based around poker tournaments, due in large part to the popularity of televised celebrity and professional poker tournaments over the last three or four years. Free online casinos have been around since the beginning, but are growing in numbers because they are perfect for selling full-fledged online casino services to the public.

Are Online Casinos Legal?

All free online casinos are perfectly legal everywhere because they don’t deal with real money, and therefore are sometimes hosted on US soil. However, cash online casinos are operating in a legal gray area. While those that try to open in places that don’t have legalized gambling are shut down fairly quickly, the offshore sites in Antigua, Barbados, Europe, and Asia freely accept bets from American citizens playing gambling games on American soil.

The FBI and Congress have been looking at this issue for a while, but have taken relatively little action. It may be that making online casinos illegal would simply be unenforceable; at this point, there are many millions of users in the United States. But allowing them to continue hosting offshore seems to be breeding all kinds of fraud, and the money may be going to fund terrorist activities and other things we don’t like.

For now, both paid and free online casinos are legal to play anywhere in the US, but this is probably going to be hashed out in the future.

Staying Safe With Free Online Casinos

While free online casino games can be a lot of fun, they can also be dangerous. The Internet casino world has drawn a lot of bad people, from the Nigerian scam artists to Russian and Eastern European fraudsters.

You first need to protect your personal information. If a site seems to ask for more personal information than they legitimately need to get your game play going, you should seek out one of the thousands of others that are out there to play at instead.

You should also be aware that most free casinos act as portals to get you interested in gambling with real money. The legitimate ones run a clean, fair game and run lots of advertising for gambling sites on their pages. But the illegitimate ones let you win a lot. If you are playing a casino game at one of the free sites and notice you’re winning a lot, don’t use any of the advertised sites from this page. If they’ll cheat to let you win on the free games to get you in, they’ll also cheat to get you to lose on the paid games in the site.