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Yep. I said it. Implementing skill-based slots is, without a shadow of a doubt, the single best thing that could possibly happen to online casinos at this point in time, and, if done correctly, will result in the biggest surge of new players we’ve seen since live casinos were introduced. As people who have been fighting for diversity of online casino experiences for literally years, we at ADADA couldn’t possibly support this notion more. At this point, you either agree or are wondering exactly what I’m talking about, so in any case, let me start at the beginning. Skill-based slots are pretty much exactly what they sound like, slots which feature heavy elements which rely on skill rather than pure luck. In a typical slot bonus game, your choices would have very little impact on whether you win or you lose. You’d have games where all you need to do is select one of several “cups” and see what reward lies underneath, or sometimes there is no interactivity at all. In skill-based slots, how much you win in the bonus round depends entirely on your skills. Imagine playing a game of “Galaga” and getting money for each alien you shoot down, with the idea being to shoot them all and get the maximum winnings possible before you die and end the bonus.

Several US states recently legalized skill-based slots for their casinos, with the very first of their kind being installed in numerous physical locations across the country. If you’re curious about that, I would advise you to read this fascinating Gamasutra article which talks at length about the process. In the UK, on the other hand, we seem to be stuck in a bit of a rut due to highly outdated gambling regulations which state that any wins made in online casinos must be made 100% due to luck and not skill. Of course, it’s an absurd rule considering the fact that many casino games, like blackjack and video poker, already rely on skill at least in part (almost no amount of luck will save you if you decide to hit on a 17), so why do they get a pass from the regulation, yet slots don’t? It’s a mess of a law that makes very little amount of sense, and yet changing it has been a nightmare. Casino laws in general (especially those related to online casinos) have been a complicated web of bureaucracy that has proven, time and time again, to be nearly impenetrable.

So, why are skill-based slots so important, anyway? It sounds like a neat gimmick, but in the first paragraph I said they’re the most important thing that can happen right now, even placing them ahead of technological advancements like VR? Well, first of all, unlike what Microgaming is trying to tell you, VR is actually a pretty terrible idea for online casino. Second, skill-based slots are going to solve a huge, gaping issue that has been plaguing the industry in the last few days – the fact that too many players leave, and not enough come back. Old players go because they grow bored, and new potential players don’t find anything interesting. The newest generation of gamblers has grown up on videogames, so it’s only natural that, on a subconscious level, they believe that skill is important to win. That’s why skill-based games like poker have been knocking online casinos out of the park, to the point where they’re given their own category. Introducing skill-based slots in online casinos will finally provide new gamblers with an opportunity to play casino games that speak their language, and even if most of them just deposit once or twice and then never come back again, that’s still a huge win for the industry! The moment skill-based slots happen, and are implemented correctly, I assure you that the profits will start falling. The question is whether the current government (which seems very hostile towards online casinos, considering their recent behaviour) will be merciful enough to allow them.

Any fan of slots – be it online or offline – has come across some of those at some point. It being April Fool’s day today, I thought it a good idea to bust (or prove) some of those. Let’s just get straight into it.

Myth: I’m just gonna hit jackpot now – it hasn’t happened in a while
Fact: Thing is, there is not really a thing like “the machine is bound to pay after a certain number of losses”. You simply can not predict the patterns played and the numbers are totally randomly generated. So unless what you are playing is rigged (and then it surely won’t be in your favour, duh!), there is no way to count when the JP will be hit. Each spin is as random as it gets and in no way dependent on what was the outcome before.

Myth: The bookies can report me to the tax authorities.
Fact: Yes and no. Thing is, you are not supposed to do anything illegal and you are supposed to declare any winnings/losses of any of your activities anyway. A gambling operator would function according and in compliance with the laws of its country of origin, so in some places they are supposed to report any winnings above a certain sum. Check the regulations in your country to be on the safe side.

Myth: I can create more accounts and thus beat the system and increase my winning chances
Fact: Oh, you genius! How didn’t I think of that! Ahm. Let me think about it. False. Same as above – it is random. So no, even if you manage to trick the operator somehow and get yourself more accounts, there is no way that will increase your chances to win (you could simply play more games from your existing one account). Not to mention that even if you manage to grab double the welcome bonuses, you will still be missing out on the loyalty rewards (spreading them across your fake accounts), which is kind of nonsense. Just don’t do it.

Myth: Damn, someone just won on the same slot I just played! That b&%$#stard! It could’ve been me!
Fact: Oh get off it. You know what RNG stands for? Random Number Generator. R-a-n-d-o-m. End of story.

Myth: There is a little army of green trolls behind every slot machine and they control the numbers that come up. If you have been a good boy/girl, they will let you win. Every time you are bad, it rains where they are, so they hate you and don’t let you win.
Fact: Obviously plausible, it also explains why I have never won big on slots.

So, that’s it for now from me, enjoy this crazy day of the year and have fun over the weekend. I hope to see you back soon for more casino and gambling related news and interesting facts.

Gaming Intelligence has announced its shortlists for the Gaming Intelligence Awards 2016. Applications were open until November 2015 and the winners will be announced on the ICE Totally Gaming conference in London, same as last year.

The Gaming Intelligence was held for the first time in 2015. It was quite a memorable event with Playtech (who are leading the charts this year as well) and bet365 winning two awards each thus being the leaders of that ceremony. The awards are a logical continuation to the trust and popularity the editorial of Gaming Intelligence have built over the years and aim to deliver the same to its readers with the selection of top operators and business from the world of gaming.
The awards are given in the following main categories.

The Industry Elite

Here are the big players of the game, picked by their performance of previous years and by the expectations from them for the coming year. Even though you would think you’d be seeing the same names here, last year held a surprise – a relatively new brand made it to the top of the Elite, proving that it is not impossible and it is still a highly competitive field, making it really hard to stay at the top and giving hope for newcomers like Baazov (CEO of Amaya).

The Next Generation

These are the companies you should be keeping an eye on (or work for!). The big-players-to-be consists of 50 hot names in the gaming industry that are just on the edge of success. Some of them we will sure hear about more in the years to come, others will no doubt be gone in an instance – in any case, what goes on in the meantime should be interesting.

Backstage Heroes

I am personally a huge fan of that category. It is to the people that you will not see in interviews or on any publications, likely their names are not known to many at all, even more so to the average player. But without them the whole gaming industry would not exist – the legal teams, customer and staff managers, sales executives and not only, techy people – the wheels of that enormous and amazing machine that we are at the receiving end of. This for me is where the awards are most deserved.

Upstarts & Explorers

This category is for the potential big players, similar to the Next Generation category but for total start-ups – the majority of those names won’t make it but then some just might so it is even more interesting to watch it happen. 3-4 yrears ago the example from above – Amaya’s Baazov would’ve been here.
Hold your breath, winners to be announced soon! Keep checking on us, we will sure keep you posted!

Alright, alright, I lied a little bit – in this article I’m not ACTUALLY going to tell you what the best online casino is. I apologize for this little lie, but I needed to catch your attention, because what I’m trying to say is important! Don’t worry, at the end of this article you’ll probably have a few ideas about what the best online casino in the UK is, but I’m not just going to give you the answer straight up. Otherwise why would I even bother writing an article? I could just tweet out “X is the best online casino ever, you guys” and leave it at that! But the thing is, the answer is a little bit more complicated than that. Allow me to explain.

What’s the best movie of all time? No, seriously, tell me, I’m curious (you can use the contact form on the main site). Look one up online if you have to, I’ll wait, don’t worry. You good? A lot of people say “Citizen Kane”, while others cite “The Godfather”. To some, the answer is a bit more whimsical, like “Star Wars” or “The Wizard of Oz”, and then there’s all the more modern movies, such as “Inception” or “Her”, and don’t even get me started on all the movies that aren’t exactly Oscar material, but are still a ride and a half, such as “Guardians of the Galaxy”. No matter who you ask what their favorite movie of all time is, the answer is almost always different. The same goes for books – is “War and Peace” the greatest book ever written, or maybe “Ulysses”, or “Don Quixote”? Or perhaps it’s a religious book like the Bible or the Qur’an? Nobody can say for sure!

So, why is that? Shouldn’t we have some metrics about what the best of everything is? Not really, because a lot of things in life are subjective. Some things are objective, meaning that they’re universal for everyone, but they’re mostly stuff like laws and rules – we all get wet when we dive in water, we’re all firmly stuck to the ground (or rapidly approaching it), we’re all going to die eventually, etc. Tastes and preferences, on the other hand, is subjective. Some people enjoy peanut butter and jelly, others like to eat tiny duck fetuses (yep, it’s a real thing). I myself am dying for the occasional boiled lamb head or soup of lamb intestines, but I bet you just screamed at the thought of eating brains (they’re a bit heavy on the stomach, so I wouldn’t recommend eating more than one at a time), and that’s totally fine! Taste is subjective, be it taste in food, movies, books, people or – yes – online casinos!

The thing is, there isn’t such a thing as a universally good online casino. Sure, there are about 7-8 online casinos which are currently at the very top of the UK market, but really, literally each one of them can serve your needs, depending on what they are. The important factor in deciding what you like will depend entirely and completely on your own specific needs, wants, desires and, yes, taste. Some sites like bestonlinecasino.info will guide you to the best online casinos in the uk and will allow you to view neatly and cleanly what each of them offers in terms of games, bonuses and features. I’d heavily advise you to look around sites with guides such as the one linked above and decide exactly what you want to get out of the online casino experience. Are you someone who wants huge bonuses? An excellent demo feature? Great mobile support? Fantastic live casino? Lots of slots? Great odds when playing card games? What is it that you hope to achieve from your online casino experience?

It would be SO easy for me to just tell you “Hey, y’know what, 888 Casino is the best one”, or “William Hill is the way to go”, or “Ladbrokes is by far the greatest thing since sliced bread”, but that wouldn’t be fair to you. What if you want to play the fantastic Marvel slots and I send you to 888, which doesn’t have them? I’d be cheating you out of the experience that you want to have, imposing my own tastes over yours, and that just wouldn’t be fair to you. The first step is to figure out exactly what it is that you want. Honestly ask yourself why you want to play online casino. Is it because of the winnings? Then you need to find a place with a lot of jackpots and high RTP percentages, such as 32 Red. Are you playing just because you like the games? If so, what games do you like? Are you looking to play one game in particular, such as blackjack, or do you want a more varied casino experience?

At the beginning of this article I told you that you’d need to work a little bit before you’ll know what the best online casino in the UK is. That work comes now. You have two tasks ahead of you – one, figuring out what exactly you want to do, and two, discovering where you can do it. Once you do that, you’ll know for sure exactly what the best online casino in the UK is. So don’t listen to anyone’s subjective advice and take risks! That’s what being a gambler is all about! Thanks for reading!

Literally every field of work or entertainment has its dangers. Soldiers struggle with PTSD, construction workers need to be wary of accidents, and some moviegoers may sometimes get a bit too invested into the movie universe (like the shooter who channelled the Joker and killed 12 people). Gamblers, as well, face their own demon lurking over their shoulder every day – gambling addiction. According to this fascinating article from The Independent, more than 500,000 people in the UK alone are struggling with gambling addiction. That’s almost 1% of the entire population of the country! And with online gambling now being literally a click or a tap away, it’s easier and easier for those people to indulge in their addiction. And being dependent on gambling is one of the worst addictions out there – while being addicted to, say, movies or videogames can only be harmful in some very extreme cases, being addicted to gambling often ruins people’s lives. Those afflicted with gambling addiction usually spend most, if not all, of their income on gambling, neglecting necessities such as food or shelter. And, just like most people suffering from addictions, they don’t believe they’re addicted. “I can stop any time, that’s just what I do for fun!”, “True, I’m losing money now, but just you wait till I hit the jackpot!” and “This is the only thing that has meaning for me, so why shouldn’t I enjoy it?” are all very common excuses among those who suffer from gambling addiction. They can’t help themselves, and not everyone has friends or family that will care enough to convince them to go to therapy or manage their finances to ensure that this addiction is curbed. A lot of people who fall into any sort of addiction, be it drugs, alcohol or gambling, do so purely out of loneliness. And with no one around to help them, and when they can’t help themselves, the only ones who can do anything about this issue are the online casinos themselves. So, what do they do to combat this very serious issue? Absolutely nothing.

Don’t get me wrong – every online casino has a link to GamCare or a similar organization on their front page, but do you really believe that’s helping even a little bit? As we mentioned above, people who suffer from addiction rarely, if ever, believe that they’re actually addicted, so do you really think that they’d look at the link and think to themselves “Or, right, I better check that place out”? That’s a very imperfect solution, and in all honesty, the link is only there (and often deliberately indistinguishable from the dozen or so logos in the footer of the page) because it’s demanded by law – the Gambling Commission doesn’t issue a certificate to casinos that don’t have it. I know I’m making it sound almost like online casinos don’t want to prevent gambling addiction… And that’s because they do not. As mentioned in the aforementioned Independent article, as well as in several independent studies, online gambling in the UK is now a £2bn industry, which is positively huge. It’s more money than any of us has seen in our lives combined, and that was back in 2012 – while I don’t have an exact confirmation on this, it really wouldn’t surprise me if we’re chasing £5bn as we go into 2016. How much of that money do you think comes from people who are addicted to gambling? As much as 80%.

The Pareto Principle comes into play here. The principle states that in most cases, 20% of the input creates 80% of the result. The observation first came about when in 1896 Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80% of Italy’s wealth is owned by 20% of the population (an observation that is actually true today for worldwide wealth distribution, with the 20% wealthiest people controlling 82.7% of the wealth). In 2002, Microsoft reported that 80% of the errors and crashes in Windows were caused by only 20% of the reported bugs. Numerous studies have been performed (a lot of which are detailed in the book “The 80/20 Principle”) which prove that the Pareto Principle applies to almost anything in life, especially in business – 80% of all sales come from 20% of the customers; 80% of all complaints come from 20% of all clients, 80% of all work is completed by 20% of all employees, etc etc etc.

So what does the Pareto Principle have to do with gambling? Well, a lot, actually. The vast majority of people who sign up to an online casino don’t actually play all that much. They make a small deposit, play for a little bit (enough to try it out) and then move on to other things. Hell, a lot of them don’t even place a first deposit, which is why welcome bonuses are such a huge thing. If you’ve ever wondered why most casinos only have a huge welcome bonus but little to no bonuses for regular gamblers, this is exactly why – they know that the people who will return and gamble more don’t need the incentive of a bonus in order to make repeated deposits, but the first-timers might need a little push to pay before they inevitably move on to the next thing that catches their interest. Using the Pareto Principle as a general guideline, we can establish that 80% of the gamblers only deposit a handful of time, while the remaining 20% are responsible for 80% of all profits. If you haven’t figured it out by now, most of that core and extremely important 20% demographic suffer from gambling addiction. Casinos physically can’t afford to restrict them because they’d be crippling their profits by as much as 80%, and in an industry that’s so competitive, with dozens of online casinos in the UK alone, that’s akin to suicide.

In a nutshell, online casinos have decided to sacrifice the very lives of as much as 20% of their player base in order to remain afloat. It’s truly a no-win situation – even if those who run online casinos want to help, they have their hands bound by the Pareto Principle. They need gambling addiction in order to survive. It’s a sad reality, and one that we need to accept… But should we? Is there a way to defy the Pareto Principle and still have casinos retain their profits while also fighting gambling addiction? There might be, but it’s definitely going to take a lot of work from a lot of different institutions in order to make it happen. First and foremost, the government needs to put their foot down and prepare a budget for fighting gambling addiction, possibly assisted by several charity organizations that can chip in through the donations they receive. That budget would be used to encourage casinos to implement more drastic anti-addiction measures, such as temporarily banning people who have gambled for too much, or having a live representative contact people to let them know that they’ve been playing for a while. Inevitably this will lead to some losses (probably not as drastic as 80%, but they’d be there), and the fund that would be given to complacent casinos would be used to alleviate the losses somewhat. In addition, casinos should also try to prevent their customers from leaving in any way possible by focusing more on regular bonuses than on welcome bonuses. Give people incentives to keep gambling besides the games themselves. Take a page from the book of the free-to-play videogame market that regularly manages to encourage its players to come back and play more with daily bonuses and promotions. A very good idea is to have a bonus amount of coins that get added to the player’s account every day they place a bet – the more consecutive days they gamble the bigger the amount of coins they get is (with a certain upper limit), but if they miss a day the amount resets. That would not only encourage players to come back every day, but will also limit the amount of time they spend gambling – it’s better to spend a £50 deposit little by little every day and get the maximum amount of coins possible than to blow it all in one day, right?

At the end of the day, gambling addiction still remains one of the biggest issues plaguing the gambling industry, but sadly solving it is going to take a lot of effort, perhaps more than is realistically possible. Still, as the online gambling industry continues to grow, so will gambling addiction, and sooner or later this problem will need to be addressed whether we like it or not. I just hope that the issue doesn’t get out of hand by the time we manage to get around to it. And who knows, maybe soon we’re going to get an online casino that can prove that it can be profitable while also tackling gambling addiction by doing more than just placing an inconspicuous link in the footer. And on the day the Pareto Principle is shattered we’ll be one step closer to solving this problem.

Hello, how is your day going? Hopefully pretty great, since you’ve found the best iGaming blog on the world wide web! Well, okay, that might be a bit of an overstatement, but hey, if you’re looking for online casino news, statistics, articles and overall good stuff, then this is definitely the place to find it! My name is Amelia Grayson (but you can call me Amy if you’re really nice), and I’ve been working in the casino market since before I was old enough even enter some casinos! I’ve always had a knack for math and a really good memory, and I taught myself how to count cards when I was 14 years old (beat that, Kevin Lewis!), though I mostly used that as a party trick to impress my friends. I know you might be thinking something along the lines of “Whaaat, 14, that’s nonsense!”, but trust me, as long as you’ve got a good memory, lots of concentration and the right technique (which I learned from books such as “Beat the Dealer” and “Professional Blackjack”) even a little child could do it. When I was 19 (younger than I’d need to be to even enter a casino in the US) I found myself a job as a croupier in London, though half of my job was using my card counting skills in order to catch other people trying to do the same. That’s where I met my future husband Richard, who was a consultant for the casino, and let’s just say it was love at first sight, or about as close to it as you can get in the real world. One thing led to another, and a few years later we decided to quit our jobs and found ADADA, an association to encourage the development of the UK iGaming market (though recently our efforts have been focused more in diversifying it).

Without going into too much detail about ADADA (you can learn more on the main site if you’re so inclined), let’s just say it was a rather astounding success. Our advice, consultations, connections and even an entire event have helped launch not just one or two online casinos, with several more brewing in the background (launching a site like that, after all, takes months at best, maybe even years). But we decided that we wanted to go a step further than that. We wanted to help everyone interested in iGaming – those who wanted to invest in it, those running it and those enjoying it. But obviously we didn’t have the physical time or opportunity to just talk to everyone, so instead we decided to create our own blog where we would write articles that we believe could be useful to anyone in the iGaming market. Both Richard and I will try to post as often as our schedule allows, and we will try and make sure that the content we provide you with is worthy of your attention. We hope you enjoy our blog!

-Amy