Sport Haven

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Everyone needs a place to hang out, so we created Sport Haven for anyone interested in the wild world of sports betting.
Actually, it’s no longer really a “wild world”. Online sportsbetting in the late 1990s and early 2000s may have been a little dicey, to say the least, but those days ended when we got 128-bit encryption and a robust network of watchdog sites.
Good timing, too — it was right about that time that many people got access to high-speed Internet connections and more powerful computers. For the first time ever, millions (or billions) of people all over the world had access to a reliable, dependable, and safe way to place wagers (and play online poker, and online slots, and many other great casino games that used to be so far away all the time!).
Also, weve managed to see many of the online casino and sports betting sites in the decade or so since they started popping up.
Here at Sports Haven, we’ll give you the tips and tricks that real bettors need to make the best choices. We’ll get you up to speed on the very best sports betting sites, and how to go about looking for a new one if you’re just getting started.
We’re just a bunch of guys who love sports and who have spent some time making bets in various places — some legal, others not so much, some friendly and some downright dangerous. Not a single one of us has nostalgia for the days in which your only choice was between a trip to Vegas and a trip downtown to see the bookie.
Also, we’ve managed to see many of the online sites in the decade or so since they started popping up. Not all of them, by any means — there’s far too many, and they change all the time. But we’ve seen more than enough to get a handle on how to spot the good ones and the bad ones (or the good ones going bad…and it never, or almost never, goes in the other direction!).
So spend a minute or two browsing our site in progress. You could even click on our links (here’s one: online casino USA) if you really feel like helping us out. Whatever the case, we welcome any comments or suggestions — especially if we happened tomakea dumb mistake along the way…

There are a handful of things that you can do to enrich your game, whether you’re attracted to roulette or blackjack or any of the diverse and superb online gambling selections to choose from. I won’t profess that I have the techniques to show you how to beat the game every single time — everybody who promises success is basically planning to grab some of your money.

On the other hand, any game you’ll find at online casinos has a handful of helpful strategies. The single most helpful hint is to be aware of your individual boundaries and learn some willpower; you should not gamble more than you can afford to lose, for instance, and remember that this ought to be fun first of all!
When it comes to online slots, there really isn’t a whole lot a player will need to know except for the specific machine’s options. Learning the symbols and their worth will help, as will becoming learning any bonus games or special capabilities.
Conversely, online blackjack will actually reward some time that you’ll need to understand the principles and develop your tactics. It’s not much of a secret that a seasoned blackjack gamer can compete with the house at nearly even odds.
In case blackjack’s odds are appealing but you don’t actually feel like learning systems, Baccarat can be ideally suited. Several of the most attractive odds that the casino offers are for Baccarat, as well as a few of ‘about fair’ wagers on Roulette.
Somewhere between online slots layout, and blackjack’s skill rewards, is video poker. Although perhaps a less exciting-looking game at the casinos, video poker stays a preference of numerous gamers on the grounds that it offers recognizable poker gameplay into a slot machine layout, and gives the player the ability to decide what goes and what will stay.

Now, I don’t have to inform many of you that the state of affairs in the United States on the subject of gambling online has gone from Muddling Through to All Messed Up over the previous 10 years. During the last year or so, we cautiously improved our rating to Possibly Not As Crappy, but I’m afraid it’s time to review that rating.

Photo courtesy of Mark Liddell via Flickr.
You see, a great many USA online gaming fans had their hearts set on a dynamic duo of bills that were moving through Congress. One came from our pal Rep. Barney Frank, and the other was by Rep. Jim McDermott. Both bills planned to resolve part of the mess that the UIGEA gave us, and both seemed promising for a little while, but have now gone into the same bog that seems to open up under pretty much every good notion in Washington.
Want a little more background? Well, at the dawn of time (say, the early 1990s), web-based gambling was hardly even an afterthought. Nobody really thought about it much because few people had computers, and the ones which they did have were not much better than pocket calculators, and the Internet was more or less a bunch of tin cans attached by a piece of string. Quite some distance from USA gambling casinos, huh?
Jumping ahead a bit, ’round about this time, George the 2nd was “elected” riding a surge of ol’ fashioned American morals — which, in this case, included being afraid of foreigners and taking law ideas from restrictive evangelists. This led to the creation of the SAFE Ports Act, which includes the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA for short).
The fun thing about the UIGEA was the way it became Federal Law: forced through the Senate at midnight on the day that Congress adjourned. The majority of the people that voted for it hadn’t even bothered to read it, which would be dreadful except that the same goes for most of the legislation passed in the Capitol (and this time I am not even being facetious, unfortunately).
One of the most substantial results was that just about all of the leading online gambling operators decided to avoid operations in the USA completely, and a large amount of people were kinda left with the impression the UIGEA banned online gambling. I’m pretty sure that was one of the goals, except that there is not actually a word in the UIGEA about how to distinguish a legal online gambling operator from an illegal one; it solely forbids banks from making monetary transactions with whichever websites are illegal. For the player, this just causes you to look a little harder for casinos accepting Webmoney deposits.
Pretty much everybody that cared thought that the UIGEA was a poor excuse for a law, and a number of people have been seeking to get it overturned. In the case of Rep. Frank and Rep. McDermott, they developed a pair of well-defined pieces of legislation to conquered the weakness of the previous flawed law. The two of them submitted companion bills to establish the legal status of Internet gambling, and to tax and regulate these sorts of sites — a nice plan for an economy that (to put it mildly) sucks balls.
Sad to say, the bills were pretty much instantaneously bogged down by a mix of predictable resistance from conservatives and also a lukewarm reception from fellow Democrats. The last straw appears to have been the peril of turnover via none other than mid-term elections, in which the deliberating Dems got very worried that the hostile Republicans were going to take away their majority (which, apparently, the Dems were not been using much anyway). Virtually everything that mattered was put aside (i.e., anything that might cause some impact on someone’s popularity to voters). A potentially-heated topic like online gaming never really stood a chance in such a climate.
Now, to summarize, we will officially demote the online gambling state of affairs to Pretty Crappy again. In all honesty, after countless compromises and amendments, few people but online poker enthusiasts would have benefited substantially from the existing bills. Which means any win would not have opened up anything to play online slots users, for instance. I know, it’s not any kind of a consolation, but at Quite Crappy Level, you need to take what you can get!