This topic was inspired by a conversation I had with my wonderful girlfriend a few days ago. I’m a gamer, and as such I play EVERYTHING – console games, handheld games, mobile games, Facebook games, board games, roleplaying games, card games, party games, you name it. That’s just what I do – I believe that every single game I play, regardless of its medium, the device it’s played on (or lack thereof) or its intended context can teach me something about gaming and how everything fits together. Naturally, that also extends to casino games. I don’t really frequent casinos all that often – I’ve gone maybe about 3-4 times in my entire lifetime, mostly just to see what it’s like (and once because one of my friends decided to get married in a hotel instead of in a church and after that all the guys went to the casino attached to the hotel and played for something like four hours – first wedding night be damned).

It bears saying that I’ve got a whole lot more experience playing in online casinos – I had to test out quite a few as part of an assignment for one of the magazines I worked for a couple of years ago, and since then I picked a few that I really liked and am still playing to this day. Admittedly, I’m not the highest roller – on average I spend about £10-15 a month on gambling, which generally brings me enough profits to keep me going. The biggest win I’ve ever had was just under £1000 on a £0.5 bet while playing slots, which was pretty cool. So obviously I know for a fact that online casinos are legitimate because I have won actual physical money from them… But there’s also this huge misconception among people who aren’t gambling who believe that online casinos are completely fake. My girlfriend, a brilliant computer coder, told me that it’d be ridiculously easy to craft an algorithm which seem genuine and can even fool verification software, tricking it into believing that it’s random when it’s really not. According to her, there’s no such thing as true “randomness” – computers can only follow very specific instructions, so ultimately what would be considered random in real life (such as, say, playing Rock-Paper-Scissors for the first time) all depends on algorithms that need to be pre-determined by humans, down to the lowest level. There isn’t just a “random” command you can input – or if there is, it has been pre-programmed by someone else and is not really random.

Obviously, she’s entirely right (I know that people often joke that women are always right, but my girlfriend really is almost always right), at least when it comes to the algorithms part… But I had to highly disagree with her conclusions that just because online casinos aren’t truly random that automatically means they must be cheating. The truth is that they have no reason to cheat – they’d get more than enough money just by playing fair! Hell, if a casino had to cheat in order to survive, how are physical casinos (where it’s impossible for the dealers to cheat) still around? I mean, it’d make no sense! Most casino games are designed with a house edge anyway, so literally all a casino would have to do to remain functioning and profitable is to have an active player base, and everything else will come into place as it is. But even though this is rather obvious to me as someone who has intimate knowledge of how game theory works, quite a lot of people just assume that online casinos must be cheating – take this thread on Yahoo Answers, for instance. “That’s ALL they will do is take your money! You MUST understand something – WHY are these on-line casinos made????? For ONE REASON ONLY – that is to TAKE your money, NOT to give you any!”, a particularly angry commenter explains. “If you honestly think that anything is going to happen besides you GIVING these people money, you are a fool who will soon be parted with their money”, he says.

Well, I disagree with that assessment. Sure, people must lose money so that other people can win. That’s really all there is to it. If someone offers you £5 if a coin lands on heads, but will take £5 from you if it lands on tails, then he must have already played this game with at least one person where the coin landed on tails – otherwise he wouldn’t have £5 to give you in case you won! That’s how casinos work – some win, some lose, and the people who lose are always about 3-4% more than the people who win, which is how the casino makes profit. As I said, I’ve played in a variety of online casinos, and not a single one of them has ever ripped me off – each one has paid out my winnings, and there have been winnings (with varying frequency) in each one. So how about this – let me give you a brief list of 5 of my favourite online casinos, all of which are confirmed as legitimate by me. I’m not going to go into much detail on those – if you want more information you can always look up a list of uk based online casinos on the Web and read up on whatever you like. I’ll just list the name, some of the bonuses, their pros and cons. Are you ready? Get set! GO!

888 Casino
Bonus: £88 upfront, 100% match of your first deposit for up to £100 more
Pros: Sleek and intuitive interface; brilliant “demo account” feature that gives you the full casino experience without asking for a penny
Cons: Not a huge selection of games; live casino glitches badly on some mobile devices

32Red
Bonus: £10 free, up to £160 300% match of your first deposit
Pros: Truly huge library of all sorts of games – slots, roulette, you name it; The ability to try out most of the games without registration
Cons: Average quality of the games is somewhat mediocre

Ladbrokes
Bonus: 100% bonus of up to £500
Pros: TONS of amazing licensed slots and games, such as the famous Marvel slots; Betting, poker, bingo & more with the same account
Cons: Clunky interface, mediocre mobile version

LeoVegas
Bonus: 200% match of up to £100
Pros: By far the best mobile casino you can possibly find on the UK market, with over 300 games fully optimized and working on mobile
Cons: Web browser version isn’t really all that impressive or standing out

William Hill
Bonus: 100 match up of up to £150
Pros: Probably the most famous bookmaker/online casino in the UK, with the reliability that its reputation implies
Cons: Relatively low amount of games

There you go, that’s five online casinos that you can check out right now, all with my own, personal guarantee of legitimacy! But hey, don’t take my word for it – each of them has been registered by the Gambling Commission (which is the UK’s foremost authority which triple-checks a casino’s legitimacy), and all of them have been certified by eCOGRA or a similar independent organization as being fair and giving everyone an equal opportunity to win. So get out there and play some games, folks! Remember – it costs literally as much as you want it to!