The effect of this decision means both Internet operators who offer online gambling to South African residents for gain, and a player or punter who takes part in online betting, are guilty of breaking the law.

Read the rest here TimeOnline

I hope this will not affect the South African webmasters.

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While many believe that online gambling could bring as much as $50 million in extra revenue for the province, Newfoundland seems to be more concerned with gambling and less concerned with extra revenue. The Premier voiced his opinion after the Atlantic Lottery made comments regarding the potential of online gambling within the province. Government officials believe that their isn’t much support for online gambling among the cabinet members and it would likely fail if proposed.

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In most cases, people contend that gambling is a game of chance that is why all winning bets are based on lady luck.

Most gamblers would insist that lady luck is the goddess of fate and chances of winning the game. They tend to believe that one stroke of lady luck on a players fate would definitely bring about winning streaks and endless shots of fame and fortune.

However, the concept of lady luck is basically based entirely on the fate of the person and not on the skill of the player depending on the game he or she is about to play.

No wonder why people always utter, “There goes lady luck again” to somebody who consistently wins the game.

However, the problem lies in the fact that the so-called lady luck is not always consistent from day one until day two or three.

On its entirety, the truth behind lady luck is basically dependent on the stroke of luck that falls upon the person right at that very moment.

On the other hand, mathematicians argue that they can combat lady luck into a more realistic viewpoint by using numbers instead of fate or what their stars tell them.

That is why critics of the “gaming industry” would rather call blackjack, roulettes, and other games in the casinos as part of the gaming industry and not gambling industry because they want to let the people believe that the probabilities of winning is not based on chances or some kind of lady luck but on the mathematical statistics of every move.

The Drawback behind Lady Luck

The problem with people relying on their lady luck to smile at them so as to ward off any bad luck is that the modern game tends to fall back on the superstitious beliefs of most primitive people.

Most of the losers tend to believe that they can ward off bad luck by using some techniques such as spreading some salts to ward off bad elements that bring bad luck.

Some even contend that the color of the clothes attract lady luck to come and sit with them.

The Conclusion

Consider this; some mathematicians contend that the odds of having or getting a royal flush are 1 in 649,739. This goes to show that if people will solely rely to lady luck, chances are they will definitely lose more than winning.

The bottom line: gambling is not about winning, it is entirely based on losing. The only winner is the casino owner who calls for the so-called “house advantage” and there is no lady luck to the rescue.

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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.

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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.

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Once it finds everything is as fair as it should be, the auditing entity proceeds to give the casino a certificate. The casino will then use that certificate to prove to its players that it is a fair and trustworthy representative of the online gambling industry. The same goes for online poker rooms as well, whose rake collection methods are confirmed by the certificate. While in real life, generating a random number is as simple as rolling a pair of dice or spinning a roulette wheel (credit goes to Blaise Pascal for that one – he invented the roulette for the specific purpose of generating random numbers), the same cannot be said about the world of computers. Computers are built on non random occurrences and numbers. Take any number and churn it through an unfathomable number of various mathematical operations. In the end, the computer will spit out a result, which will always be the same regardless how many times you run the calculations.

There’s only one way to alter the outcome: by altering the number fed into the system. Every time there’s a different number fed into the equation, the result will be a different one. The programmer can tell the computer to use a constantly changing number for the equation: its clock is a good source of such numbers. This way, a more or less random number can be generated. The problem with it is, that because it depends on the computer’s internal clock, the program will produce certain time-related patterns. Therefore it cannot be used as the random number generator of a casino game: the players would discover the patterns and they would exploit them too. Another solution to generating a random number would be through the number Pi. Pi is a number featuring an infinite string of decimals. It is also an irrational string, which means that it features no patterns whatsoever. The computer could use a clock to tell it when to jump into the number Pi and fetch a decimal from it. That way, players would never be able to spot any patterns in the RNG’s results.

Do casinos use Pi for their RNGs then? Chances are they’re not. It is more than a little impractical to use this approach. It is much more likely that the casinos’ RNGs use a very intricate formula, based on the above principle (not the method itself) to come up with random numbers. Why can’t the casino just make its RNG algo public then? It would be so much easier to prove that it’s 100% fair indeed than through the audit methods described above…Casinos can’t let the public get their hands on the center piece of their operation and livelihood for several reasons, one of which is that by experimenting directly with the algo, players would find it much easier to spot possible exploitable faults in the results. As a matter of fact, the secrecy surrounding the RNG is so big that the algorithm is periodically changed, to nix the efforts of anyone who may have spotted anything exploitable in it. The secrecy is fully justified though: at the end of the day, the casino’s very existence depends on it.

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The Morongo Band of Mission Indians, a federally recognised tribe of Native Americans in California, and a number of card clubs and casinos, including the Commerce and Hollywood Park casinos, vehemently opposed the bill to legalise online gambling in California because they wanted exclusive rights to the bill.

The way the senate bill was drafted meant that offshore poker sites and Las Vegas casinos could get it on the action which means greater market saturation and therefore less money for the initial bill proposers.

Even more disturbing for them was that senator Roderick Wright, sponsor of bill 1485, proposed that any interested parties bid for three licenses to operate ‘intrastate poker networks’ and pay the state up to 20% of the profits. This could effectively mean that the Mission Indians and Californian card clubs could miss out on the legalisation all together as they might not be able to compete with other interested cash-rich groups.

According to senator Wright, who cancelled the gambling vote before his state senate committee yesterday: “I think the bill probably needs more work.” He added: “What is clear is that it is probably moving in the right direction – and I’ll never get a consensus.” He still wants the bill to be passed but claims it is unlikely to happen this year.

The Morongo tribe and five card clubs wrote to senator Wright: “By licensing foreign operators and Las Vegas gaming interests, this allows money to leave the state instead of helping California’s economy.”

But according to Lloyd Levine, a consultant for Poker Voters of America Group: “It seems to me that Morongo’s opposition is not on principle but on the fact that they don’t get to own the whole thing.”

And with an estimated income to the state, through legalising online gambling, of between $2.4 (£1.6b) and $6.1 (£4b) billion by the year 2020, one thing is certain – this debate will rage on for a long time to come.

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