Mobile Casinos

Mobile Casino Guide 2020

The future is mobile. It makes sense. If you like doing something, why would you want to tether it to a large piece of furniture and a big, mains-electric run piece of equipment? Online video slots players are ditching their desktops – which we’re big fans of, of course – in favour of phones and tablets. They want to play on the go, in cars, planes, trains and public places, and their demand is leading a revolution in online gambling as online casinos and the industry around them adds more and more services for mobile casino users.

Game design is going mobile-first, with sizes and shapes set up to work better on smaller screens, and controls made into big, simple tap-able buttons. While casinos are changing their design to accommodate mobile casino customers too. Big, visual tiles are being used for making game selections, and less text is used all over the place. This revolution is also extending to the grease that makes the machine run – your money! (And the money you hopefully win.)

Payment has been an issue since the first gambling sites popped up in the early days of the internet – how can one securely send cash to distant companies and know that they will do what they promise? For mobile casino users, you have the added issue of making things as simple as possible – nobody wants to juggle payment cards and phones while trying to cash-up an account half-way throw playing an exciting hand of blackjack! Paying by phone is the latest development in this never-ending search for convenience.

Welcome to Mobile Casinos

We spend a good deal of our time reminding our players to play safely and securely. And we make no apology for that, no matter how boring it might sometimes seem. Nothing kills your buzz quite like finding you’ve just sent €200 to a fraudster somewhere who has no intention of allowing you to gamble, let alone letting you gamble fairly and paying you your winnings.

So this is always your first port of call when you are using a mobile casino:

How to spot a safe mobile casino in 2020

Casino sites are relatively easy to set up. But to set up a good quality site takes quite a lot of effort. Most criminals are opportunists. Most of them are not going to invest a huge amount of time and money that is needed to set up a big, fully functioning site. For that reason, we tell our users to first look for a good quality site. It should have decent design and be easy to use in any case, of course, but where it’s a site that is going to be taking your money from you this quality could be worth more than good user experience.

Be especially wary of sites that seem to put a lot of effort into a splash welcome screen and promise you lots more later, but won’t let you look around until you’ve given them a load of cash.

Legal mobile casino sites – be responsible for yourself

The best way to ensure that you are using a safe mobile casino site is to use a legal one. Everything we say here will depend on the jurisdiction you are in and the jurisdiction you are in when you use a mobile casino site. It is your responsibility to make sure you know the law where you are and what you need to do to be on the right side of it. Notice that we start by emphasising the user’s responsibility. Scamming is bad news and a terrible crime, and if you can do anything to stop it, or report it when you see it then you should do that.

However, the person whose actions you have the most control over is you! If you try to circumvent local laws and regulations you will put yourself outside the law and beyond using the law as a way to get back any stolen money. So, annoying though it may be, if you break the age limits, payment limits, or geographical rules then you really only have yourself to blame if and when things go wrong. Take extra care if a site or affiliate site seems to offer you a way to play without using age verification of some form or to get around a legal ban on gambling in your country (hello Americans!).

Legal mobile casino sites in Europe

Gambling is legal in all European Union states. However, the legal picture in each state is very different. If you’d like to study this it’s actually a highly disputed and interesting area where EU-wide regulations come up against the rights of individual countries. One thing that does stretch all across the EU though, and that you have the right of protection under is the GDRP, which is a data protection law that applies across the EU (not all European countries are in the EU, including the UK now).

So a big sign saying that a site is GDRP compliant or that asks for permission from you when it collects data about you is a good sign. Checking privacy and data protection regs at any site you use is a good habit that too few of us have.

When it comes to mobile gambling laws and licensing though things are more complicated. Don’t worry, none of this should really get in the way of you enjoying your gaming, but it is always important to play safely. To do this you must play at a site that is licensed. And it’s no good having licensing from anywhere. In the best of all worlds, you want a license from the country where you are playing.

Mobile Casinos Licensing

Not having checked every last jurisdiction on earth, we’re still fairly positive in saying that all countries that allow legal gambling has some sort of licensing or regulation in place for that country. However, very few online mobile casinos offer their services in only one country. It is possible, but it removes a lot of the benefits for both business and consumers of having an international business.

Capitalism being capitalism, for the business that often means setting up in a low-tax, low-regulation economy and offering services into a high-tax, high-regulation one. The morality of that aside, your worry is to see that the site you are playing at has a licence, that that licence has some teeth – will the authority that produced it, for example, act on your behalf if you have a complaint – and is recognised where you’re playing. Please be suspicious about this sort of stuff. There’s no need to play with fear, but it is worth checking that the licence exists – it takes about 10 seconds to copy a logo onto a website, you need to see the licence at the licensing authority’s site.

Some countries insist that they alone license companies that offer gambling services to their citizens. The UK reformed its laws relatively recently to force international companies to be licensed in the UK to host UK players. Be sure that you know if you are in one of those countries, which include Spain, Belgium and Bulgaria. However, some countries allow international licensing. This has led to a sort of market in licensing services among national authorities.

That is why you will often find yourself playing at a mobile phone casino site that is licensed in Malta, the Isle of Man, Antigua and Barbuda, Montenegro, or Curacao. These are all, for most companies, off-shore options. Malta and the Isle of Man are both tiny, they’re not great markets for any product that needs to get hundreds of thousands of customers. The same is true of all of the other countries, and, some of those countries have relatively undeveloped economies.

There’s no need to be fearful of mobile casinos licensed in these countries. All are legitimate to a greater or lesser degree. Malta, for example, is very popular because it is in the EU. The Isle of Man has a slightly complicated legal status but is essential in the UK. Malta’s gambling regulators have a good reputation for investigating complaints about fairness. Of these, we have only seen serious concerns raised about Curacao, and that is something that the country’s gaming authorities are working on so keep watching this space. The UK’s licensing authority is considered the gold standard for gambling regulation by many authorities in the industry. It is both a large market and a base for companies. You need to see it if you’re playing in the UK, and if you see it from elsewhere it’s a good sign of a decent site.

The two big choices with mobile phone casinos

Playing by phone offers a new choice for players. While some mobile phone casino sites have always offered the option of downloading an app (what we oldies used to call a programme) to your computer, the option is becoming standard in the gambling market as players switch to mobile phones.

It’s the standard operating procedure for mobile casino sites to ask you to download their mobile casino app. It makes a lot of sense. If you like a site and it offers you a good experience that you like then it’s very convenient to have an icon on your homepage you can tap and head straight into the lobby. Browsing to a site takes time. You’ll almost certainly have to sign in every time, which might involve using long, complicated passwords, and mobile browsers don’t always provide the best experience. However, we urge our players to consider downloading mobile phone gambling apps carefully.

The reason why sites want you to download an app is that they know they’ll keep seeing you time and time again if you have a simple way of getting to their games. Customer loyalty sounds good – we’re taught to think of loyalty as a positive force – but before you start to show any customer loyalty to a new mobile casino, ask yourself how much loyalty they show to you. The answer – if you think about it – will be zero. Businesses want your money. That’s it. They will dress it up in all sorts of ways, invent relatable characters to represent their brand, will put attractive young faces and bodies all over their sites, and make a load of promises about free gifts, bonuses, and free spins. But they just want your money. So you need to be savvy about how you interact with phone casino games.

We’re not here to tell you to join a revolutionary anti-capitalist party. But we are here to tell you that if you start to become loyal to a site or mobile casino app that doesn’t deserve your loyalty, you will end up losing out. The shopper who doesn’t shop around doesn’t get a good deal. And using a mobile casino app that you’ve downloaded makes shopping around that bit harder.

How to spot the best mobile casinos

We’ve advised you to play safe and to shop around, but we also want you to have a good time. Honestly, we’re genuinely sorry to have to take such a negative tone sometimes, but looking at the way some sites market themselves makes us want to speak honestly to our customers. You can and almost certainly will have a great time with your mobile gambling experience. The warnings we share are to keep you away from the bad guys, but it would be wrong of you to take away the impression that that means that the majority of the industry is dishonest. It isn’t. There are a lot of perfectly legitimate sites that are doing their best to succeed by offering great service and a good choice of games.

Here’s how to spot the best mobile casinos:

Quality all the way

Don’t sell yourself short! Demand a quality experience from the moment you first see a site to the moment you log off. Sites or apps should be well designed with clear signposting so that it’s obvious where you need to click or tap to get to where you want to go. Look for good quality, clear, and obviously honest text. Badly translated copy that has been thrown together isn’t a good sign of how things might be going in the customer service or help departments.

Talking of which:

Please please help me

Before you sign up to any phone casino sit,e you should be sure you know how to contact its help departments. Would you believe some sites don’t even have this information?! Don’t get dazzled by hundreds of mobile slots. They won’t be any use to you if you can’t call for help when a game won’t pay out your winnings!

So make sure you look at the sites help pages. There should be a good set of frequently asked questions covering the most obvious problems. A lot of mobile casinos now offer chat options, but it is nice to see a proper email address you can contact and the gold standard for help services is a Freephone number in your home country. Should you ever need to escalate a question to more serious help, knowing that you can contact the site’s physical address is good, as is knowing how to get in touch with its licensing authority. Check all of these.

But I just want to play!

This is about games at the end of the day, and most players in the mobile casino world want a bit of variety in their experience. Take a look around any of the top mobile casinos and you will see a huge selection of games. The availability of online gaming has been a revolution in recent years. There are now hundreds of game studios putting out thousands of games.

A top mobile casino site will offer you a good choice of games from a variety of makers.

Some companies – Microgaming, NetEnt, for example – are so big that they offer their own casino software. These sites are great – particularly if you like some of the wonderful online mobile slots that these companies produce – but they will tend to prioritise games that the site owners have produced over other companies.

That’s not a problem, but an independent site might have more variety.

Mobile Slots and lots of games

We’ve talked about variety while tending to focus on slots, but mobile casino sites are now about much more than slots. After all, the original casinos in Monte Carlo, Mayfair and Las Vegas on which they are based were built on green baize foundations.

So look for some casino games at your site too! And you no longer have to limit yourself to playing against machines. These days live game streaming is becoming more and more popular. Live dealer games offer a new level of intimacy to your gameplay, as you interact with an actual real-life person!

Game designers have been going all out to produce these games in a format that works well on small screens as well as on desktop machines, and mobile casino games are now as good as anything you can download to a Windows PC.

Tempt me!

Welcome bonuses are the bread and butter of the mobile casino world. In order to get you to play their phone slots, mobile casino apps will offer what looks like free money. It’s not free money. We love mobile casino bonuses, and we’ll go into them in more detail later, but you should have a realistic view of what they offer. Perhaps the best way to think of them is in the context of other successful businesses that allow you to use their services for long periods of time without you paying them any money and with no commitment that you will. Those businesses are either bankrupt, or you’re thinking of a charity!

So, read the small print and check the rules, but keep shopping around for good bonuses. With new mobile casino sites popping up all the time, competition is hot and heavy. So sites do need to pull out all the stops to attract attention. At the very least you should expect a sizeable bonus when you put your first deposit into your account. You might also hope to add some free spins on top of that. But remember our note of caution.

Keep me interested

Do you just sign up at new mobile casinos all the time and rarely stay any length of time? It’s not an uncommon pattern with casino players. It probably doesn’t bother the industry too much, but it might be that you’re chasing after new welcome bonuses when you could be developing a decent relationship with a site you’re already using.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking you to forget everything we’ve said about shopping around and misplaced consumer loyalty. But when you sign up at a site, do us a favour: head to their news page or blog page. If they have one that’s a great sign because it likely means that they are going to back up a welcome bonus with a continuing programme of events and gifts.

This is good in a number of ways.

First, it shows that they are committed to keeping their customers, which will probably mean a good quality site.And it shows that you might want to invest some time here. Mobile casino play can be a bit solitary, so a social aspect to your experience – like tournaments, for example – is a big bonus. If there’s no reason to stick around, why should you stick around? Demand that sites keep you interested, but reward those that do!

Beyond the casino

If you’d like a one-stop-shop for your mobile gambling needs, you might even want to look beyond slots, and beyond casino games – live and simulated – and into other areas of gambling. A lot of sites will now offer a betting service too, so you can place a few bets on politics (good luck with predicting that at the moment!) or the Champions League.

Having all your gambling needs met in one place – if it’s one you trust and enjoy – is a big plus.

The world of the mobile casino bonus

We have already said a few warning words about mobile casino bonuses, but we’re going to go into a little more depth here. The first thing to say is that while we’re asking you to be cautious, we don’t want you to accuse us of being overly negative. Mobile casino bonuses – when used well by informed consumers – are a great thing for online slots players. As usual, information is power and study is rewarded when it comes to mobile casino bonuses. These little beauties come in two broad categories: no deposit casino bonuses, and standard casino bonuses.

No deposit mobile casino bonuses

No deposit bonuses have historically been very rare. The obvious reason for this is obvious! No-one gives away free money! So, it should be equally obvious that you will be required to hand over something in return for a no-deposit bonus. It might be your payment details, with a promise that they won’t be charged unless you do actually make a deposit. The most important requirement is a play-through-requirement though. This also applies to bonuses that you need to deposit to collect.

A play-through requirement is how a casino site turns giving its players money into a profit. It usually is expressed as a multiple of your bonus or perhaps a percentage, and it refers to the amount of your own money you must gamble at the casino before you can start to withdraw the cash that you win with the money you were “given” in your no-deposit mobile bonus. So, not quite free. If you see a no-deposit mobile casino bonus with no catches then don’t just grab it and cash it in, stuff it and put it in a museum!

Standard mobile casino bonuses

More commonly you will be offered a bonus at a new mobile casino site that requires you to put some money in your account. Typically, bonuses will be expressed as percentages – 100% bonuses are common – of your first deposit. In that example, if you deposit €20 you’ll receive €20 for free. This cash will be put in your account as “bonus funds”. It is very likely that your bonus funds will be treated differently from the money that you put into the account – the real money is usually taken first when you gamble.

Most mobile casino bonuses also have play-through requirements, though they are likely to be less onerous than the ones demanded no-deposit bonuses.

Finding the best mobile casino bonuses

Sites like ours can help you find the best mobile casino bonuses. We check out sites, see that they’re operational, fair, legal and worthy of your time. Any site that doesn’t pass those tests isn’t worth bothering with, even if it has a 10,000% bonus with no play-through requirements.

So shop around and check reviews whenever you look at a mobile casino site. And then check again! This is your money remember, so don’t mess around with it! We also look for no deposit casino bonus codes for mobile phone users.

Mobile Casino Games

Let’s have a look at some of the most popular mobile casino games you can play online. Only the best mobile casino games are listed!

Mobile Roulette

We’ve said there is more to life than slots, and mobile roulette is perhaps the closest of the traditional table games to a slot. This game has roots that go back centuries and has been on offer in casinos since around the time of the French Revolution. But that age-old game is simple enough and graphical enough to work fantastically well on the smaller screens of the mobile phone casino age. The game is simple, but it has depth, and it’s worth exploring the betting tables in particular before you start to dive in for real money – play mobile roulette for free if you can!

That’s relatively easy to do these days. Licensing means that the game is available in many more free-to-play versions than there are actual mobile roulette casinos. (They will try to get money from you, though, usually in the form of in-app purchases.)

Roulette is available in three variants: American, European and French, and European is the most popular variation because it reduces the house edge. French games have a couple of minor variants that increase the player’s chances slightly more.

Live roulette is exactly the same game, simply played as a streamed live game rather than a simulation. It shouldn’t be any more likely to give you a win than any electronic game. These games are becoming more and more sophisticated: Evolution Gaming makes a version of Immersive Roulette with loads of camera angles and tricks. While the game area of roulette is small, the betting area is large and relatively complex – most of the table in a casino is about betting not gameplay.

With small, touch screens the solution is usually to show the game and the betting area on separate screens that flash up when needed. You’re tapping here, remember, so make sure you put your bets where you want them to go, or your game of phone roulette could be even more expensive.

Mobile Blackjack

You might think the answer is poker, but blackjack is the most popular gambling game in the world. At least in official terms – who knows how many hands of poker will be dealt between friends tonight. Blackjack has boomed with the internet, because like roulette it is a relatively visually contained game. Cards are dealt from a shoe to players, there are only three cards, and while many players can play, the game is essentially a one-on-one contest between a player and a dealer. This game should play OK on a single mobile screen.

It’s simple and sophisticated and we recommend you take a good read of a mobile blackjack guide before you start playing for real money, and play for free when you get the chance. The basic aim is to beat the dealer by getting a total closer to 21 – without going “bust” by scoring more – than theirs. The chief variants to look out for are the odds paid on wins on “naturals” or “blackjacks” – hands of 21 made with a 10-scorecard and an ace (worth 11 or one). There are also a number of side bets and betting options that may or may not be available to players, so check out the rules when you sign up to play phone blackjack.

Mobile Baccarat

Baccarat is a byword for sophisticated high-rolling gambling. Like all the best gambling games, its fundamentals are relatively easy to grasp, but it has depths and variants that make it rewarding to dig deep. The game is similar in many ways to blackjack, as it boils down to a contest between a player and a dealer to hit a particular total. Baccarat is available in a very large number of variants, so you really need to make sure you know what game you are playing when you “sit down” at a mobile baccarat table.

Mobile Video Poker

Poker is the best-known gambling game of them all. It’s also quite a complicated game, and the chief attraction of it lies not just in the fall of the cards and the play of the game, but in the psychology of playing against other players in a betting contest. At the moment that is hard to replicate on mobile phones – though poker rooms and Asian poker apps are starting to build in popularity. But for solo players, one of the biggest ways to get the thrills of poker is by playing mobile video poker. This game is a hybrid of poker and slots, with “hands” being delivered in quick succession. Slots work well on mobile screens, and so does video poker.

Before you start playing mobile video poker make sure you know what variant you are playing. And there are a lot of them. But if you can play slots, you can play mobile video poker, so we suggest you drop into a game or two and give it a try.

Mobile Bingo

Bingo is one of the simplest gambling games there is. Numbers are drawn at random from a run, and players tick off those that are marked on cards that they have bought. The first player to complete patterns or to fill in a whole card from those numbers is the winner. That’s the simple version! There are variations on mobile bingo. The chief one is between UK bingo and American bingo.

The British game is played to fill lines and then a full card. US bingo is played with patterns to fill in. Gameplay in both is pretty much identical though, and all online bingo is essentially automatic – you buy a card and numbers are automatically marked off on your cards as they come up.

Phone bingo works well on small screens in some ways, but the game was particularly successful on larger screens because it has a well-developed social side. In the real world that has meant playing in bingo halls and social clubs, but online it’s meant very lively chat rooms in almost all bingo rooms. That’s much harder to replicate on a small screen, where typing isn’t so natural and people need to use the whole screen to look at the gameplay area.

Mobile Bingo Apps

That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy mobile bingo though. Almost all sites now have mobile-friendly sites and many of them have downloadable apps – check out our advice on apps earlier in this guide. Apps can range in complexity from a simple bookmark to a site to a fully-fledged experience, so check out what is available. We think one of the best ways to play mobile bingo is on a tablet with a relatively large screen, and we bet that a load of players are playing that way right now. Bingo is exciting and fun, and most sites come with lots of slots games on the side as diversions, so sign up to one now and see what you think.

Mobile Keno

Mobile keno is a growing gambling trend. The game originates in Asia, and it’s very popular in Australia. With the World Wide Web, you can play keno wherever you are though. From a casino point of view, it’s a simple game to provide, even in a live-dealer version. The game itself is a version of a lottery. You pick up to 15 numbers from a sequence of 80, and a random number generator picks 20 numbers as winners. You’ll win depending on how much you’ve bet, how many numbers you picked and how many of your numbers are picked. A single number pick that comes up as a winner is worth 3/1. Pick six numbers and get them all and you get 75/1.

The big jackpot, of course, is for hitting 15 out of 15. It will pay you 10,000-to-1, and it’s this that gets gamblers clustering around the keno boards in casinos around the world. This simplicity of gameplay makes it relatively easy to play on a small screen.

Mobile phone casinos keep on growing

The mobile casino world is growing all the time. We have new mobile casinos to report every week, and if you enjoy gambling using your phone there has never been a better time. We hope you enjoy your time at mobile casinos, and we also hope you keep your wits around you and play safely.

Remember that a good mobile casino will give you good safe gambling advice and you should be wary about playing when you’re in a bad mood, playing in order to change your mood or gambling with money that you cannot afford to lose. But use your brain and have a realistic expectation of what to expect from online mobile gambling and it can be a good and healthy part of your online entertainment mix. Make good use of free play and demo modes as well as mobile casino bonuses to delay spending your own money for as long as you can.

Every possible gambling game is now available on small screens, and there’s every reason for you to take your phone into the casino!