TWSE
News Rates Online Gaming and Internet
Casino WebSites
(Probably Barbados?
Bermuda?) July 2010
Do I get to travel the world checking out casinos? Noooo. Certainly not Monte
Carlo, not Las Vegas, not even Atlantic City; not that I would eeever go to New Jersey
anyway. Did you know drinks aren't comp'd for free to players like they do in
Nevada? No free booze, no money from Steffi. Anyway, instead my assignment is
to rate gaming sites on the Web, so I'll be working from my loft and providing my own
ample supply of vodka. The editor said I get no travel allowance, no money for
drinks or food, and of course, no funds for gambling.
Wagering on games of chance on the Internet for actual money, for US citizens at least, is
not legal. So while tens of billions and billions of dollars is wagered by Americans
on-line anyway, our short-sighted prudish government doesn't get a penny of taxes out of
it, much less any of the technology jobs that we need so badly right now. These operations
need piles of routers, firewalls, servers and the nerds to work on them. I have at
least three areas I am going to rate sites on: security, friendliness, and fairness.
I'm going to make another martini and then Google "on-line gambling" to get
started.
Update: I first investigated what I'll call "Blackjerk dot com." You
can figure out the real name easily enough, Blackjack dot com. It was full of
miserable gamblers and even had people asking if anyone else had ever got their wire
transfer confirmation when they finally did try to cash out! Not bad enough that a
Player had to give them their credit card number to this off shore site, but then they had
to give them their bank routing number to try and get their money back! Wow, and
Players were often hostile. I have screen shots of players not only using the worst
of profanity, but actually bullying other players to leave the table and go commit
suicide! A sick site in my opinion.
After that terrible experience, I checked out some other overseas gaming sites, but they
all wanted me to download software to my PC in order to play. I don't trust that and
neither should you. These sites should be able to pay programmers who can write code
that allow their games to operate in a normal Internet browser environment without any
unknown add-ons. Installing "special" software from a gaming site located
in the Caribbean or God knows where just strikes me as a really bad idea, so steer clear
of anything like that, it's not a safe practice.
Gaming at Yahoo of course is free and does not require your Pay Pal
account, credit card number, or bank account information to play any games there. By in
large, it is almost more of a social site populated by people chatting while playing games
ranging from 21, to Video Poker, to Texas Hold Em and more.
Most folks I met are friendly and engaging at the Yahoo games. Some players are great for
a good laugh. A decent paced Poker Table with some witty players can hold your
attention for hours, believe me. Still, there are issues even at Yahoo. Some players
do use cyber-threats and vulgarity and violate just about every term of agreement for
decent behavior at Yahoo Games or try to interfere with legitimate play. Fortunately at
the Poker Tables, one Player, the Host, is responsible for the conduct at the table, and
as Host, they can "boot" Players off that poker table if they start to become
offensive or disruptive. It's a handy feature that a lot more gaming sites need to
have in order to keep players civil with one another.
Ironically however, the biggest problem I uncovered at Yahoo Games is winning! If
you do play well, your account ends up having so much "money" in it that the
incentive for you to continue to follow your rules of a disciplined gambler can end being
your biggest loss of all...
 -Steffi Panzer avatar, Film
& TV Correspondent
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TWSE News - Sports and Gaming
