When it comes to online gambling, trust is an issue that’s sure to surface sooner or later. As a player, you simply must know what you’re going up against. Casino gambling is not like online poker where you go up against other members of the public. Casino gambling has you playing against the house or rather against its random number generator. If the random number generator happens to be tinkered with, you will obviously not have a fair chance at the tables. The deal is that you’re not supposed to have a “fair” chance anyway, on account of the house edge and the house drop, but those represent legitimate fees the casino needs to earn in order to be able to keep running and bringing you your favorite casino games. If the RNG is tampered with, the player will have to deal with a much bigger disadvantage than the house edge and that just shouldn’t be part of the package.
How do players know which casinos they can trust though? There’s a system in place which does in fact allow players to gain an insight into how the casino’s RNG operates. The casino hires an independent auditor (a company specialized for this very task) to periodically check its RNG. This auditor will then take it upon itself to run a check every now and then and to determine whether or not the payout percentages are indeed the ones advertised by the site. The online casino will get to slap a seal of approval onto its webpage, which will pretty much guarantee that it is supervised by an independent authority. Most of these auditing entities are well known by players, so the mere presence of the seal of approval constitutes a guarantee as far as the fair nature of the operation is concerned.
What prevents sites from just copying an image of the seal and slapping it onto their homepage? Nothing really, but such copied seals carry no value whatsoever. A real seal carries a link to the auditor’s site, which displays the certificate offered by the auditor to the site, as well as some of the periodic reports. These things just cannot be counterfeited. How big an importance should players give to these reports provided by the auditor though? The reports usually consist of 2 parts. One detailing the RNG used by roulette, blackjack, slots and video poker games. These games represent the backbone of every online casino, so by covering them, the auditor basically covers the whole operation. According to experts, these reports delivered by the auditor are only important in their existence. That is, as soon as a player notices they’re missing, alarm bells should start ringing. There’s always a reason behind why the auditor stops delivering the RNG reports. The fact that the reports are missing may well indicate that they were simply not satisfactory, and that is why they were not publicized.
The final report included in the auditor’s package is the one concerning the general payout percentages. This one is the most useful from the players’ perspective, but it too can be misleading. In many games, the size of the house edge is heavily dependent on the skills of the player. In blackjack for instance, player skill has a highly visible impact on the house edge. The house edges made public in the report reflect minimal values. One shouldn’t forget that the report contains the house edge and not the house drop. The house drop can be much bigger than that and it too is highly player-dependent.
Online casinos often give rakeback like loyalty bonuses to their players. Check out a poker forum or a rakeback site for the best rakeback information. In online casino gambling, such rakeback like schemes are called comp deals.
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Tags: auditors, Online Casino, poker, RNG