Facebook Online Casino

March 2, 2012

This is hands down the largest, most important piece of news we have reported on this year, in fact probably ever. Everyone knows the name Facebook. The world’s largest social networking site with more than 800 million active users. Love it or hate it, you cannot ignore Facebook.

In a shocking move earlier this week, Facebook announced plans to start offering online blackjack games to its users. These will initially be free games, but real cash games will follow. At a later stage, other online casino games, including online slots will also follow.

Now this is something pretty amazing. Most online casino operators would be willing to pay billions to gain 800 million potential customers visiting their website every hour of every day. Facebook could, actually should, clean up entirely if they follow through with this.

However, we cannot wonder whether this is actually a feasible project for Facebook. Facebook is used by people in every country in the world. Each of those countries has a separate, usually entirely different stance on online gambling, and the legislation which governs it. Facebook would need to ensure that everyone using the Facebook Online Casino was actually residing in the country they signed up as, and that they exclude players form countries where online gambling is illegal. The situation is further confused by the current state of affairs in the USA. In some US states’ online gambling is now legal, in others the Wire Act still prohibits online gambling. The potential administration overhead for Facebook is enormous, and we can well see them getting themselves into legal difficulty as well. Although quite frankly, the Facebook management team are old hands at dealing with legal matters, they simply throw money at them until they go away.

Quite how existing online casinos would fair should Facebook deploy a full range of casino games is not a simple matter. Many would undoubtedly lose a large percentage of their customers, especially the smaller ones. The larger ones, which manage the huge progressive jackpot pools, would probably not be affected much, unless Facebook started to run progressive jackpots as well. Actually, the mind boggles on this, imagine a progressive jackpot contributed to by tens of millions of players? We could be a looking at a billion dollar payout!

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