When Did It Hit You...Im Hooked On Online Gaming?

[GGW Laurie]

when and where did you discover online gaming and were you hooked the first time like myself? i saw an item on t.v about a pregnant woman who sold her belly as a billboard for an online casino, i think it was golden palace but not for sure. i started looking around and was just amazed at all the casinos out there. i played at a casino called monaco gold and i did a check(good ole days) for 25.00 , built it up and then tried my luck at poker, this went on for three days and i cashed out at 18k and my check came in the mail about 10 days later for the whole amount. i thought this is great ach, netteller, click2pay and all these other depositing methods, how wonderfull. that was 2005 now we are going into 2008,am i still glad i saw that goofy tv add? yep, guess i am. im still here and still playing but with less depositing methods and a set amount that can be sent to u.s players. anyone else have a story?

[tim5ny]

When I got tired of driving 3-7 hrs. to the nearest casinos.

[peteyweestro]

iwas listening to sports talk radio when an add for bet on sports came on and at the time i was using those illegal betting cards that used to be around , so i said hell this is great i got a pc in my living room i'll be able to bet on all the games then after joining bos i saw they had a casino that i played at for around 4 months when i then found out there were many casinos with much better software and games then bos so thats when i started my microgaming love fest and only used bos for sports

[yameater]

In 1999 I got an e-mail inviting me to play at a casino called Roman Casino. I put $50.00 in and played roulette. The funny part is that I was using an older I.B.M. computer that was 6MB.and It took about 15 minutes for the ball to spin around the wheel each spin! Of course an hour and a half later when I was finished I thought I would look into this online gambling thing and try it someplace else. I found out later that Roman casino is NOT a very reputable casino and, I doubt I would have been paid if I had won anyway. I got into trying a lot of different csinos after that. Geezus, I think I've played about all of them!

[silkprint]

I got an email out of the blue offering me a free $10 to play slots only at some now defunct casino . I played on that $10 for a week .

[venetian]

I was going to Vegas ten times a year and someone out there told me they played video poker online. I did a search, found Grand Banks (I know) and started winning about $4000 a week, and at that time I was getting paid. Had a dispute, found Casinomeister and found a brand new legit bunch of casinos and kept winning. I figured this was better than Vegas, no planes no saving up for the trip etc. Just sitting in my jammies making money. It was 2006 when the bottom fell out for me. I was still winning some but not near like before. Then this year it was all over. Now I go to my local casinos and lose my ass once a week. I really miss the 'good 'ol days.

[Casinomeister]

...Just sitting in my jammies making money. It was 2006 when the bottom fell out for me...

Of your jammies?

When I first heard about online casinos, I thought who would be stupid enough to give these guys your credit card info.

Dealer: What do you have?

Player: 18?

Dealer: Ah, shucks - I have 19. I win again <grin>

Player: Damn.

In 1998 was working for a Internet translation firm out of San Diego, and I met some of the land based casino operators who were wanting to go online (with Crypto). They wanted their websites translated, but were a little reluctant to get into the business since they didn't want to be confused with the crap casinos in Central America - that's where I got the idea of Casinomeister. That was nearly ten years ago.

I wasn't much of a player, I was a webmaster. But I started goofing with some of the casinos as they came on board. I really liked multi-hand VP - I thought Blackjack sucked.

I played a lot - mostly VP and some slots up until 2002 - when Thunderstuck hit the web, and it all changed.

Imagine slots before "free spins". I can't

[vinylweatherman]

For me, 2004/5 really. I knew about online casinos before that, but always found them using malware to self install their icons, so assumed the whole thing was one big scam. This shows just how the rogues can affect the image of the WHOLE industry when they are the new player's first point of contact.
In 2004, I got an offer from the shopping site "themutual.net", which was based here in the UK, and they offered an incentive of around £25 to deposit and play $50 with 888.com (casino-on-net). This was a virtual no-lose situation, so I deposited the $50 and eventually lost it all in 2005 (didn't play much). Since then, I have found that "themutual.net" only pays out on around 50% of these offers, and this can be increased to 70/80% only by chasing them.
My next, and first REAL effort, was at UK Casino Club, where they had these scoreboard tournaments, wheel of cash, and various bonuses. My first sessions were good, so I eventually joined the others, and the peak event was my PAT Royal in April 2005 for an unbelievable £16,000. This was probably the point where I was properly hooked on the concept, but since I have been a gambler since the age of 7 (seaside arcades) it was an easy transition from Fruit Machines to casino slots, and seeing and trying the "new" games of Video Poker and Blackjack, both of which gave the impression of being based partly on skill.
The rot set in with UIGEA, and before this there were increasing problems with "bonus fraud", an issue I partly understood because one of the fruit machine forums lead me to a bonus whoring website and forum, where the best bonuses were advertised. This forum lead me to the rogue casinos of Crystal Palace and Winward, although Winward paid all but $25 of my near $1000 profit from their SUB
A stupid mistake by Crystal Palace lead me to Casinomeister after I checked out "safebet" and found a banner farm where I was expecting some kind of regulatory verification site. I don't know WHY I checked, just some "gut feeling" kicked in. I found a forum on safebet where the post about Crystal Palace were all highly negative, and further use of Google eventually turned up Casinomeister, where I found most of the offers on that bonus whoring site were from "rogue casinos". At this point, I quickly became an INFORMED player, much less likely to get screwed over.
In 2005/6 I launched "vinylweatherman.net" as a bit of a learning exercise (don't forget the £10K still left over from that RF). I have all but deserted my usual motorway haunts in favour of my office, and now bedroom, where my latest high spec PC resides (it can even cope with MG software).
2007 was a year of decline, it seems scandal after scandal of the "not paying players" kind hit, some were found to be player fraud, but others were cases where genuine players got screwed, and it took much effort from outside agencies to get justice, because the casino CS were just rude and arrogant to these players - this affected reputable casinos, not just the rogues where such behaviour is to be expected.
We are being assured by the industry that their responses have been "proportionate", but there is no way of verifying this as we cannot see what has actually been going on due to this regard for secrecy through fear of helping further fraud take place. This secrecy seems to go well beyond what is strictly necessary in order to prevent repeat fraud.
In the second half of 2007, concrete proof of deceptions in casino software emerged, one shock being that some Microgaming 5 reel slots were "rigged" in the sense that the chance of winning was not a function of the reel bands, i.e they were weighted, despite the fact this had been denied by the information that MG allowed to circulate about their software within the player community. I no longer believe that when we think we see "patterns" in these so called "random" games that it is all in our minds because our brains were wired to make sense of our environment. I now believe there is more to find out about these "random" games, and that the big software houses do indeed have something to hide about how what we see on our PC's is generated.
2008 will be the year of in depth investigation of these "patterns", as this provides another avenue for "entertainment" with the software other than playing promotions with ever incrreasing, and in some cases totally ridiculous, WR!

[GGW Laurie]

its been driving me nuts all night , what was the name of the online casino that paid for the use of the pregnant womans belly as a billboard? hubby says its not golden palace but i think it was.im almost positive but i wont bet him on it..........................laurie

[SlotsWizard]

its been driving me nuts all night , what was the name of the online casino that paid for the use of the pregnant womans belly as a billboard? hubby says its not golden palace but i think it was.im almost positive but i wont bet him on it..........................laurie

You'll have to tell hubby that he's wrong, because it was Golden Palace.

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/5-15-2006-96199.asp