By Samantha Williams

Playing at a casino online has a lot to offer in terms of entertainment and prize winning value. Pretty much all casinos offer the same, if not necessarily in the same quantities!! For example if you are a new online player and you look at first deposit bonuses, you will be hard pressed not to select a casino which offers you a 400% first deposit bonus, over a 100% deposit bonus. But let’s just examine this concept for a moment.

There is no casino online which does not tie their wagering requirements into their free bonus chips offers for first time depositors. When you look at this logically it makes sense. If they are going to be giving you £400 because you deposited £100, that is a lot of free dough! They want to make sure they get that money back, so they are going to ask to you “in the spirit of fairness”, to wager something like 4 or often more – as much as 12 times your initial deposit amount plus the bonus funds before you make a withdrawal. If you don’t meet these terms you lose the bonus funds not already spent.

When you have been writing about casinos online as long as I have, you start to see a pattern emerging. The BIG brand name casino online will offer smaller deposit bonuses, bigger prize money and a much faster wagering requirement to make withdrawals.

There is nothing underhand about this practice, it is all completely above board, but it sorts of boils down to the fact that “nothing really comes free”. However all is not lost, if the casino you fancy playing at has a humongous first deposit bonus and you want to take advantage of it. You then have to live with the fact that it will take a lot of wagering of your own real money before a withdrawal can be made.

On the other hand, if you still fancy playing at that site and you want to be in a position whereby you can withdraw any winnings whenever you feel like it. Just make the minimum first deposit amount and take whatever you get free with it. That way, you make not end up with £400 in your bonus account, you may have only £40, but pound for pound you still earned the same bonus as anyone else.

When it comes down to the final answer, it really lies in reading the terms and conditions of any casino online you would like to join. It isn’t all about bonuses, it is also about fairness and when all is said and done, fair play works both ways. Personally, I would rather play with a big brand name even if the bonuses are only 100% of £50. The prizes will always be better and the sense of security a player feels makes the online gambling experience so much more relaxed and fun.

By Samantha Williams

Did you know that history was made when Chris Moneymaker, became the first online poker player to beat the odds at the 2003 WSOP final table and win $2.4 million. He started out with a bankroll of $39!

This is what online casino poker has done for the poker industry in general and now many players for website teams participate in large prize pot, land based tournaments. Chris Moneymaker was 28 years old when he achieved this feat from his online casino poker room – Poker Stars, and the amateur became a pro!

This is not the only time history has been made during this phenomenal era for online poker. At Full Tilt Poker, on the 17th November 2009 history was made again when the largest pot in an online game of heads-up Pot-limit Omaha ever, was won! This prize totaled $878,959 and the winner was Patrik Antonius, who was playing against “Isildur1″ – obviously a fan of Lord of the Rings. However, just like Isildur lost the ring, so too did “Isildur1″ lose the prize pot.

So you see playing casino poker online really can pay off big time if you know what you are doing in this game of skill and strategy where nerves of steel are a plus.

The game of poker has a reputation for being favored by cowboys in the Wild, Wild West, and has been played for more than 200 years. People believed this game to be a bad game which only people with bad reputations played, when it is really a thinking man’s game where good reputations are made.

The phenomenal growth in the popularity of playing poker world-wide has definitely been inspired by the fact that online casino poker rooms were made available. The first of these was proto-typed by Microgaming in 1994 and was actually a casino, the rest as they say, “is history”.

Other online gambling operations were in existence before poker became available online, and yet none of these facilities – which were mostly sports books, and casinos had the same impact on the gambling world.

Planet Poker was the first established online poker specific room and it was launched in 1998. This site is still active today, and in comparison to some of the big names, it is a relatively small site. This is actually surprising because they did for a time enjoy the status of being the “sole” online poker room on the net.

They introduced a rake structure of 5% up to $3 maximum rake and this structure is still used as a benchmark in the industry. Even though a great many things have changed hugely since 1998, this rake structure is still widely used.

Paradise Poker entered the fray in 1999, then in 2000 came Poker Spot. Party Poker and Poker Stars came online in 2001, and now in 2010, there are 545 sites, with 16 standalones and the majority of these sites are networked. This game has grown exponentially!!