Online Casinos: What Makes a Good Casino?

What makes a Good Online Casino?

PlazaCasinos.com - An Industry Leader since 2002

When surfing the net, it's certainly not hard to find an online casino. Ads, banners, links, and offers are littered everywhere. Sometimes you might even receive promotions - wanted or unwanted - in your email box.

Many of the characteristics of good land based casinos cross over to the online world. Graduated table limits for players with different bank rolls, variety of games, player rewards programs, and good atmosphere keep customers loyal both offline and online.

With online casinos, there a few more things that you should watch out for when choosing where to place you next bet.

1) Customer Service Quality and Response time - This aspect of online casinos is absolutely key. Offline, its easy to grab a slot attendant or ask a dealer about the game you're playing. Online, however, you're left to send emails to a support staff you can't even see. So how do you know which ones care about their customers? Response speed and the quality of their answer. In reality, if a casino doesn't answer your email within a day, you'll simply find somewhere else to gamble. Good casinos don't want to lose your business, so you'll find that they respond in a timely and thorough manner.

2) Deposit Options - Lately, depositing to an online casino has been absolute hell. Credit cards usually don't go through, and bank wires or ACH transfers are time consuming and slow. Many prominent online wallets, like Neteller and Firepay, have ceased accepting USA gambling related business. If you were at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, there would be many ways of depositing cash, with nearly every type of credit card in the world accepted. With online casinos, however, you have to carefully choose your deposit options. Reputable online casinos with solid reputations tend to offer more deposit alternatives and tend to also get your money cashed and ready to play faster.

3) Gaming software - At your local land based casino, there's no software to worry about, aside from the video slot machines. Online, the software rules the gaming experience, and determines just how fair gameplay is. Some of the most popular and well respected online gaming software companies are Microgaming, Playtech, Real Time Gaming (RTG), Oddson, and Casava Enterprises. A few casinos offer their own proprietary software platform. At first, one might think that an unregulated software brand might be out to cheat the player. The fact is, even the best online casino software is susceptible to "tweaks" and adjustments by underhanded casino operators to put the odds unfairly in the house's advantage. As a result, the best way to judge software quality is to play a few test sessions before betting more money. Also, some casinos have professional audits and payout percentages listed for various types of games. Check these carefully (but also realize these numbers could be fabricated) and compare their claims to your actual gaming experience.

Don't let online casinos intimidate you. They want to make things as easy as possible, and make strong efforts to retain customers.

Like their land based couter-parts, online casinos value a discerning customer who knows how to play and enjoy his or herself. Online casinos are the same and the good ones know how to keep your business if you intend to play on a frequent basis.