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It is never an easy thing to combat lethargy. It is like a disease that once it gets hold of you then it is very difficult to get out of it again. In my other sports betting blog on bwin I remarked about the plight of horse racing in the UK that was struggling because of falling prize money. This highlights for me the problem with how online gambling has affected the global betting market. Land based casinos basically had it all their own way years ago in terms of their own particular brand of business.

If you wanted to go to gamble then you either had casinos, bingo, the football pools or betting shops. But now the rise and rise of online betting and even the facility for people to do so from their own televisions has had an affect on casino attendances. The casinos in the UK are in a similar situation to horse race meetings in so much that they depend on people getting off their own backsides and going out of their own homes to visit them.

I believe that as the older generation is replaced by a younger and more lethargic generation then this problem will increase and get worse. Land based casinos are going to need to come up with clever and innovative ways just to keep parity but once again we have a problem of too much choice. Do not get me wrong, too much choice is a good thing for the public but a bad thing for each individual outlet. If you are a land based casino which makes a profit of £200,000 per year and you drop to £100,000 per year then £50,000 per year then that is a worrying trend. But an online casino that made a profit of £10,000 per year from scratch is doing well.

Casinos do not like card counters, well actually let me rephrase that……casinos do not like successful card counters. There are legions of card counters who are unsuccessful and casinos make money from them. Let’s face it, if you were a card counter who merely recycled money then any casino should be thrilled to have you. There would be times when this person would be spending money at the bar or in the restaurant and that makes the casino money.

Then there will be times when a card counter brings guests with them or creates action simply by being present on the table as other players may look to play if there is someone else sitting in the game. So it is clear then that not all card counters take money out of casinos. I have known some very experienced card counters that were recycling money due to poor game selection.

This can easily happen in the UK where the selection of casinos isn’t really that great. So you can easily find yourself in a situation where your local casino only has one table active and if that game is poor then you may have to travel a considerable distance to find another casino. So what do you do if this other casino also has only one active table and this game is a poor game also? The worst conditions for card counters are when the dealer isn’t dealing enough cards for high card counts to be worth playing or to arrive frequently enough or if there are too many players and the game is too slow. Knowing how to card count very well is far from being a licence to print money.

There is really nothing to stop you from participating in other forms of gambling inside your local casino. If they have a card room then you can play whatever game you want for money. Where I worked people played games like Kalooki, Mah Jong and Brag for money. But there is really no limitation on what you can play for money or what you can bet on. I have known people or read about people betting on rain drops going down a window pane on which one reached the bottom first.

Poker players have been known to make some amazing prop bets on things like losing weight and golf. But if your casino manager allows it then you may be able to play backgammon which is one of the best gambling games out there and every bit as skilful as poker. I wish that backgammon were played more in casinos and I have only ever seen it played for money on two occasions in the nine years that I worked in gaming.

It would not be impossible to play games like Monopoly for money inside a casino, I have never seen this done and it may have never been done but there is no reason in my mind why it could not be possible. All you need is a card room that is not in use and you can play most games. In all of the casinos that I have worked, there have been nights when the card room was not in use. It may be worth you having a word with the casino general manager on what games they would allow in their card room. Most managers would welcome diverse games if it brought new interest and possibly new players to the club.

Everybody wants to play games like online roulette and blackjack online and why shouldn’t they? The skill required to beat blackjack is well known and you only have to Google areas like card counting, blackjack and roulette to see the history and mystique surrounding these two great games. You will have a great experience playing online casinos and I can be almost 100% certain of this. This is to do with the online operators themselves wanting you to have as good an experience as possible.

You may encounter the odd cash out problem but with sites like bwin then you basically know that your money is as good as being in a bank in terms of safety. Also with the latest banking scandals still fresh in the memory then one has to think that your money could be safer in some instances.

If you lose money or worse still blow your money then who is to blame for that? Obviously you are and if you are this reckless with money then chances are that you would have blown the money down some other avenue anyway. So you cannot blame an online casino for this negative experience.

But why not take advantage of all of the bonuses that you can to make your play as profitable as possible? If you treat your online casino experience as simply nothing more than entertainment to relieve potential long hours of boredom then you will have a long and happy experience of online casinos. Being able to experience the thrill of roulette from your own home is great and you can feel like James Bond with all of the latest graphics that are available these days.

During my time in gaming both before and after I worked in casinos then I have heard of numerous cheating attempts with most of them being blatant silly attempts that were doomed to failure and probably did. But one such case that I heard about but never found out if this actually came to fruition involved placing an invisible resin type substance into certain numbers of a roulette wheel.

This substance hardened like varnish but was clear to the naked eye. What this meant was that the substance could be applied to certain numbers without it being visible. But the peculiar characteristics of this substance were such that it recorded drastically different bounce to the other non applied numbers.

So if you applied it to the red numbers and not the black numbers then it would be perfectly possible that the ball would stand a far greater chance of coming to rest in one or the other due to the differences in bounce. The only problem was in how to apply this substance to a roulette wheel undetected. This would almost certainly need to be done from the inside from someone who not only worked there but who worked after hours or who had access to not only the casino but also the CCTV cameras as well.

There are several people who work inside all casinos who have this sort of function from general managers to managers to security staff and receptionists. So it is possible to have an inside job done on a casino. If you can overcome these two factors of getting the substance and then someone working on the inside then a casino would be very vulnerable to being hit in this way.

There has always been one huge Achilles Heel with casinos when it comes to security and this is to do with staff collusion and inside assists. In this aspect then it is no different to online poker sites and the now famous “super user” accounts. At the end of the day, staff at many live casinos feel under paid or actually are under paid. So they above anyone else have the incentive to cheat and collude with punters.

A few years ago I was privy to inside information at the time about a team of Chinese cheats in London who were operating using hidden CCTV cameras. These people were eventually caught but the word on the inside was that these people took far more money than was revealed or that the casinos were aware of.

I feel that this is where the casinos are vulnerable; there is always a problem with regards the casinos coming face to face with highly intelligent and creative people. Casinos have gone more and more high-tech over the past few years and I feel that this has sort of protected them from the old time cheats of a few years ago. However it has also left them vulnerable to a whole new army of high-tech cheats who will be attracted to casinos like moths to a light because of the money that is on offer.

As always the really sophisticated cheats are one step ahead and always will be and the casinos are always playing catch up to these people. Only when they have been taken for a large amount of money do they then adjust and learn the new techniques.

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Myself and my partner had our first casino trip last night in absolutely ages and it felt sort of strange. I cannot remember the last time that we went to a casino but it was well before the World Cup started. A combination of the World Cup and the WSOP has led to me being far too busy.

I expected to play some blackjack last night but the tables were full all night and I never fancied standing behind. So instead I went and watched roulette and I found a dealer who I thought that I had a very good read on. Actually this reminds me of a very good book called “Read The Dealer” but that book dealt with blackjack.

Dealers can be read in roulette in a similar way and any experienced gaming operative who is telling the truth will tell you. However it does require certain circumstances for this to happen. I struggle to read any dealer who reverse spins constantly and if that is company practice then I would never bother to even try.

But in this casino then the practice was to always spin in the conventional direction of clockwise on right handed tables and anti-clockwise on left handed tables. I didn’t play for high-stakes and only in £1 chips but I did win two consecutive £1 bets on the number. I passed some of my winnings back but ended up winning £75 which paid for our meal and the drinks for me and my partner and so I was very happy with the evening.

When you go into a casino for the very first time then the experience can feel a little daunting. There will be bright lights, the atmosphere and the feeling of being somewhere entirely alien. However you need to remember one very important thing and this is that the casino actually want you to be there. At the end of the day they need income to provide them with the means to fund their considerable running costs whether that comes from other sources like the bar or the restaurant or the gaming floor.

Your first port of call inside the casino will be the reception area where you will be greeted with a friendly face. In the UK then you will need to apply at least 24 hours before you will be accepted. This allows the casino time to check you out and to also give the customer a cooling off period. On your first visit the reception staff (in the UK) will take your picture so that they have visual identification of you for their records and also for security reasons as well.

But going to a casino is basically no different than going to any other night club in so much as the people that go have their own individual reasons for going. Some people who go to nightclubs do so for the after hours drinking, others go because of the dancing, while some may go for reasons to do with meeting the opposite sex or it could be a combination of the above.

It is exactly the same with casinos; you could go to have a drink from the bar after normal pub hours are over. Or you could go because you wanted a meal or to socialise with others. Many go of course for the gaming entertainment but the fact of the matter is that there are numerous reasons to go to a casino above and beyond mere gaming.

While casinos are not evil places, they often attract people looking to cheat. This is an unfortunate side effect but fortunately the number of people who cheat are well in the minority. In my experience the vast majority of cheats are nothing more than opportunists that take advantage of something if and when the time arises.

For instance, there is a world of difference between someone who finds a wallet and then keeps the money inside it without handing it in and someone like a pickpocket who actively goes out and steals one.

In one instance one person has the money by default and is still technically stealing while in the other, the individual has actively planned the act. In a similar way, it is like the act of murder and manslaughter. Both involve the taking of a human life but only one was deliberate.

It is the same with cheating inside casinos. I believe that at least 99% of any dishonest activity stems from opportunists. Maybe someone was paid a bet that they shouldn’t have been paid and said nothing but whatever the cause, very few players actively plan cheating moves in my opinion.

But that is taken from the total population of people who inhabit casinos and 1% of that population still accounts for an awful lot of people. The last casino that I worked at had around 22,000 members and 1% of that figure comes to 220.

While only around 5000 of that total were active core regulars, that is still 50 people who actively go out to look to cheat. So that is an awful lot of people and if those 50 people each cheat the casino out of £200 per week then that is an amazing £10,000 a week being lost to cheating.

There is no doubt that being a Croupier sounds like a very glamorous life and job to many people. The reality is something rather different of course as inner city land based casinos are often populated by many types of people who you would not want to be around.

But yet there is no doubt that becoming a Croupier is something that is not only accessible for the ordinary person but it can also lead to a very exciting life. I have known several people personally who were fully trained up in the UK and got their experience there and then left and went to work on the cruise ships.

This was a life that attracted many people although most of them came back to the UK at some future point in time. Imagine sailing around the Mediterranean or the Caribbean seas and being paid to do so.

The downside to life on cruise ships is that the hours can be long and there is nowhere to go except on deck or to your cabin. So I can understand how the novelty would wear off after a few weeks or months of doing this.

But then again I have also spoken to people who have worked on cruise ships and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. So I suppose that this indicates that they do not suit everyone. If you do not like long hours or life on the sea then cruise ships are not going to be for you. But a certain type of person could find this life very rewarding and exciting.