Gambling is one of the few things you cannot do in Second Life. It is forbidden. You won’t find any casino’s or such. There are good reasons for that, everywhere around the world governments have made legislation about on-line gambling, to try to keep it a bit limited, controlled and not too addictive. So it would be remarkable if any avatar could start a casino.
However, games of skill are allowed. As skill is involved, it is no gambling. Who plays good and smart has a better chance of winning than who just hopes for the right numbers. There is a wide variety of machines available.
You can play for money (L$) or you can go to a freeplay machine where you can still win some L$ but playing doesn’t cost anything. Freeplay sounds better than it is, you will win only a small amount of L$, but it is free and it is fun.
In case you prefer to play for real money, games start from about 10 L$ (that is about 0.02 US$) all the way up to 50.000 L$. Most players play with very modest amounts. That way it stays fun without costing too much.
Here are some places offering these games:
Game Station
Gamezone @ The Rock
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The games
There are many different games to play, mostly board games or card games. I am working on indexing all different games so I can give you an on-line manual. Most games also give a manual in the form of a notecard when you touch the game. In order to be allowed within Second Life a game needs to be a skill game. That implies that that who plays smart has a better chance on winning than who doesn’t. Try to understand the game you are playing, otherwise you won’t win much. All skill games
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Contests Many places, surely the more serious ones, offer contests around the games. Look at the picture here to the right, this is a high score contest. On the bottom you see that there are 509 games already played and still 1490 to go, after that the 7 players who reached the highest scores will win a price. The first one L$ 1500, the second one L$1000 and so on. So if no one beats Mary Austrone her score of 68750, she’ll win L$1500, if someone still gets over it she’ll drop to the second place. And so on. Contests add a bit extra fun to playing the games. On the picture you also see a jackpot. Whoever reaches a score of 88226 wins the jackpot of L$500. A popular form of contest is the cumulative contest, sometimes also referred to as cumulative relative contest. All your scores are added up to each other (and then divided by e.g. 1000 to not make the numbers too large), and the players with the highest total win. To make these contests more fair the score is relative to the amount you play with. So if you play with L$100 your score is 10 times as much as when playing with L$10..This is fair as otherwise the one playing with L$100 would be forced to play 10 games of L$10 instead of 1 of L$100. |
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Reward systems
Reward systems run over a period of time, e.g. a week. They reward the players who played the most games (to be exactly played the biggest total amount) with a reward.
In some cases that reward is just cash, with a single click. In others you’ll have to come back every day to get a part of your money. Others require you to stay near the board for a while to get the money. The last ones are cheap attempts of the owner of the board to make his place look crowded..don’t fall for that trick.
A special form of reward systems are those which work with game credits. You don’t get money but when you play a game you get it refunded. So, suppose you got 1000 game credits and play a game of L$100 you’ll get L$100 refunded and still have 900 game credits to go.
You’ll most likely appreciate the reward systems that work with a single click the most. But realize that those that make you come back have an advantage for the owner: Players come back..due to that he can also give higher rewards. The same is true with game credits. I said can, not will…You might wanna check if the reward system is worth playing.
Reward systems are a nice extra competition, all players of all games are involved in the competition. Winning is easy, just spend a lot. But then you notice that other spend really really a lot. They usually do so by playing smart, when you spend a lot but also win a lot back, it is way easier to spend L$100.000 in a week then when you loose almost every game.
Where to play?
I already adviced two places on top of this page of which I know they are good. Also the contests and reward systems are very fine. (One has contests with high scores, one has cumulative contests, both have daily and weekly reward systems)
There are a lot more places that are good to play at. Make a good comparison of the scores, the contests and the reward systems when choosing a location where to play, surely if you plan to play more than just a little. It is worth it.
Some have truly complex and ununderstandable reward systems, often that an attempt to hide the fact that its generousity is very very limited. That is not a good sign about the attitude of the owner. Some see you as a bag of money that should be emptied, others as a valuable customer..go for the last.