A tale of two hobbies

Regular visitors to my blog will know that I have another great passion in my life besides astronomy: online gaming. I’m not talking about World Of Warcraft or anything like that, but online gaming in the sense of bingo, casinos and the occasional flutter at the online bookmakers (although weirdly never on sports, my last wager was on who would win the X Factor – Olly was robbed, and so was I).

As a nice way of following on from my last couple of posts about online gaming I thought I’d do a quick run-through of online bingo and online casinos and pit the two against each other. So, here it is, my definitive (sort of) guide to the best way to gamble on the internet.

Online Bingo

I discovered online bingo at the end of this summer. I’d been to a couple of clubs but found that visiting in the evening was interfering with my stargazing and new found penchant for TV soaps. So I decided to try the website of the club I’d been going to, as that allowed me to play whenever I wanted. To be honest, online bingo is not too dissimilar to the game I’d been enjoying offline: you still get cards, numbers are still called out. But it’s simple and fun and there seems to be better special offers online. I’m not as excited now about online bingo as I was when I started playing but I think I’ll still have the odd game, I’ve been quite lucky with it and I also like playing the slots games in between sessions. Which leads me neatly on to…

Online Casinos

In terms of variety, online casinos have the edge over online bingo sites. They give you the option to play roulette, blackjack, poker and, my favourite, online slots. I got into online casino gaming after I’d being playing online bingo for a while, when one of my friends told me about the online casino no deposit bonus (basically a small amount of money to get you started). I picked a casino that looked nice and got started on the slots. To be honest I think they are a bit arbitrary; there’s certainly not much skill involved in hitting the button and watching the reels spin. But online slots can be very exciting. And the randomness of their alignment appeals particularly to the astronomy fan in me.

If you’re looking for fun, simplicity and a sense of community (the chat rooms can be great) I’d say give online bingo a go, but if you’re more serious about experiencing a varied selection of games, try online casinos. It’s hard to say which is ‘best’ out of the two, but at the moment I think I probably prefer online slots, so the casinos win.

Good luck!

Ps. In case I don’t get a chance to blog before, Sunday (17 Jan) sees a close Earth approach by Asteroid 136849. Pretty interesting for anyone interested in CEOs, it comes within 0.03 astronomical units. There are also a couple of comets coming nearby that day, notably LINEAR-NEAT, which will be closer to us than the sun for the first time in seven years.

Pps. Still no real progress on the move to Hebden Bridge. As well as looking for a suitable place I’m also doing research into who will be able to provide reasonably fast internet access in the area. I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Games, Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.