Wait! Before you go any further, before you place your first online wager, I have some helpful hints for you.

Of course, if you’ve already placed your first wager, the hints are still helpful…but I was hoping to catch you before you made any of the same mistakes that I made.

I could go on and on about those mistakes. I’ve been placing wagers online for so long that my first one went out on a 14.4k dial-up modem and I thought it was so high-tech (the wager was NOT legal, by the way, nor was it a very smart thing to do!). Incidentally, those were the days that online slots ran in DOS, when they ran at all!

Several years later, when the first REAL online sportsbook opened up, I signed on immediately — too immediately; it was the beginning of a rash pattern that took me another few years to fix.

We’re all more or less familiar with the usual threats of viruses, hackers, identity theft and all of those other Internet bogeymen. In the early days, as many of you know, we were less prepared and far more likely to run into trouble. The technology had advanced far enough to provide a lot of opportunities but not far enough to keep those opportunities as safe and secure as it is now.

Online gambling still suffers from some of those problems, but it’s pretty easy to avoid them — if you’re a little more cautious than I used to be, and as long as you do some research on the site that you’re looking at. Many bad online gambling sites (check online casino USA for a list) give themselves away immediately, if you know what to look for.

You should definitely be looking for the magic phrase “128-bit encryption” which means that all of the info that you submit to the website is thoroughly scrambled and impossible to decipher by anyone but the intended recipient. Hackers will just see it and go somewhere else immediately because they know what it means.

More tips coming soon!