Types of casinos
Casinos can be divided into two main categories: traditional casinos and online casinos. A “traditional casino”, that is a brick and mortar casino, generally has slot machines and table games and can be set up on land or as a riverboat, based on state and local gambling laws.
Online casinos are the perfect alternative to traditional casinos, as they allow people to enjoy a wide range of popular games from the comfort of their home, enabling gamblers to play and wager on casino games through the Internet.
Online casinos can be divided into three groups based on their interface: web-based casinos, download-based casinos, and more recently live casinos.
Web-based online casinos are sites at which players can directly play casino games without having to download and/or run any software from their own computer. Games are mainly represented in the browser plug-ins Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Shockwave, or Java and require respective browser support. So, users actually must have considerable bandwidth to load the graphics, sounds, and animations since these all come from the site, itself, and require the web-browser plug-ins which most internet users already use anyway for all kinds of other websites; online newspapers, entertainment sites.
A very small number of casinos allow games played through a plain HTML interface and the graphics on these sites are generally quite inferior to those provided through download-based casinos. Another huge difference is the speed of games. This is generally hampered by bandwidth restrictions, traffic, etc. Disconnection problems can be a huge disturbance as well. Generally speaking, most of the bigger casinos prefer to use download-based software and you’ll find a much larger choice of games and options with these sites. For example, most, if not all, of the sites reviewed by GamblingPlanet.org rely on download-based software.
Download-based online casinos are the most common and popular casino sites on the web. Here, users have to download certain software in order to play that casino’s games. Once the software is installed, it connects to the casino service provider and handles contact without browser support. The biggest advantage here is speed. All the graphics and animations are included in the software and run from the computer instead of the internet. The only downside, of course, is the initial download and the need for the installation of the program. Some people worry as well about the risk of downloading a virus and/or spyware but so long as you’re acquiring software from reliable sites and use a solid anti-virus program, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Live-based casino gaming allows web players to interact with games played in a real world casino environment. Online players can see, hear, and interact with live dealers at tables in casino studios worldwide.