The old adage is true; when one door closes another one opens, and this year has seen hundreds of thousands of new players discovering the excitement and thrills of gambling online!

With so many new players flooding into the online casino scene, many of them may be among our new readers – if so, welcome and allow us to point to some of the current major trends in online casinos. Below are quick introductions and explanations on a number of the more popular online gambling activities, which we hope will direct you towards a gambling experience that will lighten your mood and help you through putative upcoming lockdowns with minimal discomfort!

Blackjack

Blackjack is an old game with a long and storied history stretching way back to the early 1600s. Blackjack is a member of a family of games that are collectively known by the name of their earliest form – twenty-one. Twenty-one is a more informative name for these games as they essentially feature players competing against a dealer trying to achieve a hand or cards that are collectively worth twenty-one.

It’s probably the most played betting game in the world and for good reason – although reliant on the random shuffling and dealing of cards, there is still enormous room for player skill to figure into relative success or failure. While in the past, and in physical casinos in particular, some of these skills historically included the card-counting abilities exemplified by the MIT Blackjack Team that you might have heard about, these days this is no longer an option due to the number of decks used or simply because much gambling these days takes place online with digital cards.

Yet there is still a significant part of the game that allows for players to learn different betting strategies and tactics, as well as experiment with different variations on Blackjack games themselves to find one that suits them. With so many available across the internet’s many online casinos, Blackjack is definitely worth checking out for gamblers getting into the scene now.

Monopoly Slots

More recently, a dominant trend in online casinos has been the emergence and rising popularity of Monopoly Slot games. Slot games in general typically generate about 70% of most modern casinos’ income and so are a huge part of casino operation both in the physical world and online. Younger than both Blackjack and Roulette, Slot machines have been around since the very end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s and have been one of the gambling activities that has best translated to an online format.

You’re surely acquainted with the image of someone pulling back a big lever to see reels of spinning icons and flashing colours ultimately landing on a perfect sequence for a huge jackpot payout. Well this is precisely the experience that has been translated to digital format and what better theme exists for this experience than Monopoly? Certainly this is the way many people feel, especially in the UK, where Monopoly Slots are hugely popular.

Instead of generic fruits adorning the spinning reels, Monopoly slots are decorated with great images taken from the beloved board game such as famous pieces like the hat and wheelbarrow, and even Mr Monopoly himself. The natural synergy of the themes big money, business and hotels, with casinos and flashy lights and colours means that some of the best slots to bet on are Monopoly slots, so you should definitely consider checking them out online as you pick up the hobby of online gambling!

Roulette

Roulette is another classic and massively popular betting game. Though slightly younger than Blackjack, the history of Roulette nevertheless stretches back at least as far as the early 1800s, and potentially even further before then. In Roulette the player has less direct agency once bets have been placed compared with Blackjack, yet this only amplifies the importance of adopting and managing a suitable overall betting strategy when playing.

Similarly to Blackjack, the long history of Roulette in physical casinos has afforded us delightful stories such as that of Richard Jarecki, who used careful analyses of slight imperfections in physical roulette wheels to identify which numbers were ever so slightly biased and made millions betting accordingly. Yet in the same way as above, in moving to digital space, players can no longer make use of such peculiarities of actual physical roulette wheels.

Nevertheless, as most Roulette players will tell you – succeeding in Roulette, particularly in the long-term, will require you to develop a skill-set ideally built on the foundation of one of the many competing strategies out there, such as the Martingale Strategy or Paroli System.