Do you know that online casinos keep secrets from you? Of course you do; we all do. What we don’t know are the online casino secrets themselves…except WE DO KNOW some of their top-secret secrets, and we’re going to share them with you today.
I’m sure they have more secrets, but they’re so secret that even I don’t know what they are, and I’m an online casino aficionado! But the secrets I do have, I’m going to share with you now.
Secret 1: They hide their bad reputation from you
As a sensible gambler, you do your due diligence before joining an online casino. Part of this is reading reviews and visiting forums to see how people rate the casino.
Obviously, if a casino has a ton of bad reviews, you won’t play there…but, some casino owners are crafty. There’s a way of concealing these reviews (and I don’t mean paying people to leave fake reviews, although that happens too): rebranding or registering a new casino.
If a reputation goes too far down the toilet, there’s not much point in continuing under that name. A savvy business person who wants to continue can either rebrand the existing business or can register a new casino.
With a rebrand, it’s easy for you as a customer to find out if the casino is the same as an old casino: somewhere on the page will be information saying who the parent company are and you’ll see that they’re the same company.
With a new casino, it’s harder to find out because they change the business entirely. It involves a little more digging. If you play the UK online casinos, you can check Companies House for details about the directors. If two companies have the same directors and secretaries, it’s a sure sign it’s the same company, just in a different name. Be careful of making assumptions here though, because there are plenty of valid reasons for a business to incorporate under a new name (e.g., they want to change the legal structure of liability).
Secret 2: They DON’T want you to play games with a high house edge
The online casinos want you to play the games that give them the best return over the long term. Contrary to what you might assume, this doesn’t mean they want you to play the games with the highest house edge. They want a slow and consistent stream of money from their punters, not a big chunk straightaway.
When you lose too much money too quickly, you’ll lose interest in the casino and never return. When you don’t lose too much over the long term (but still lose), it’s much better for them because you’re more likely to stay.
Their philosophy: “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar”.
The casinos will use nudges to guide you towards these sorts of games, such as giving you bonuses for them.
Secret 3: They know how to get you more invested in playing
There are tactics they use to get you more involved in gambling. E.g., if they can get you to download their app on to your phone, it makes you more likely to play for a variety of reasons. First, it prioritises their casinos in your mind when compared to other casinos that you don’t have an app for. Second, they can use notifications to remind you to play – if they get you at the right time, you might end up playing when you normally wouldn’t have played.
Secret 4: They never tell you which games give you the best odds
It’s easy enough to find the odds for each game a casino offers, but it involves a lot of work. You have to look for the odds yourself, which are all listed (they have to be by law in the UK). Some casinos have thousands of games, so you can imagine how long it will take you to find these games manually.
The casinos will never disclose this to you in a handy list of high odds to low odds games. Well, never say never, but I haven’t come across one that gives this information up so readily.
Secret 5: They don’t provide data on wins and losses
True, you’ll always hear about it when someone hits a jackpot – they like to shout that one from the rooftops. This can make people assume that wins are common, but you’re not getting the counter information about how much money people lose.
I don’t think they’ll ever publish this information, but if they did, I think maybe we’d all be a little surprised that the losses aren’t as high as we assume (see Online casinos secret 2 above to understand why).
Secret 6: They make it as hard as they can for you to find the wagering requirements
The wagering requirements on some bonuses can be ridiculous to the point that people wouldn’t want to take them up if they knew about them. That’s why some online casinos will make it as hard as possible for you to find the terms and conditions of the wagering requirements. This is especially the case with non-UK based online casinos. We are lucky in the UK because we are well protected by laws about how the casinos tell us about wagering requirements. In particular, that the:
- Terms and conditions must not be unnecessarily complex.
- Terms and conditions must not be hidden from players.
(Source: Gambling Commission website)
However, the casinos will still try to engage in some forms of concealment, but ones that they can apply plausible deniability to, such as making the font smaller, or making the font colour so that it doesn’t stand out.
