We have been doing a load of work over the last couple of days to make it easier for you to keep on top of updates to the site.

First up is our RSS feed which publishes a link and summary of every article we publish to the site. You can subscribe to our feed using any modern browser or even a dedicated RSS feed reader.

• Our main RSS feed for worldwide readers.
• Our RSS feed specifically for US readers.

We have also just created a Twitter account which lets us post short, quick messages to let you know what we are up to, info about any promotions or tournaments ending soon, published articles and the like. This one os for those of you who want to be up to date with everything going on with the site - we will publish more frequently here than the RSS feed. You can receive messages via the web, instant messenger, or even SMS on your mobile phone. Our Twitter feed is here - you need to sign up to Twitter to subscribe to our feed.

Lastly, we have introduced a notifications button on each article for registered members of the site so that they are notified any time a comment is added to the article. You will also be automatically subscribed to any article you make a comment on, or forum topic you create. You can alter your notification preferences by clicking "Watched posts" in your user menu on the top right of the page.

You'll need to be a registered member to watch posts. You can register here.

Registered members also receive our monthly newsletter where we give you a quick update on the latest promotions, articles, and tournaments featured on the site.

If you have any suggestions for other ways you would like to receive our content please leave a comment and let us know.

We've been waiting and watching and waiting some more as Microgaming's Mega-Moolah jackpot increased steadily over the past few months. Well the good news is that it has finally been won at the very tidy sum of over $5.5 million, but the bad news is of course that you or I didn't win it!

The lucky punter goes by the name of Klaus from Finland, and he is naturally ecstatic about his $5.5 million win, coming off just a 50 cent spin while playing at Blackjack Ballroom Casino. I'd probably fall off my chair if I won that amount of money so when he said he was "stunned and shocked" and "my hands were shaking", then you know that's got to be just about the understatement of the year. Mr Lucky is being flown to Sydney, Australia where he will be presented his prize by the Casino Rewards group (operators of Blackjack Ballroom). Let's hope they don't pay him in cash or he'll need a whole plane to himself to get it all back to Finland.

The exact jackpot of $5,556,753.68 is the largest progressive jackpot won at a Microgaming online casino, and Klaus becomes the 13th Microgaming progressive jackpot millionaire. It also takes the total progressive jackpot payouts by the Casino Rewards group to over $27 million.

The Mega-Moolah jackpot has been reset, but fear not! It is already back to almost $2.8 million, which is still one of the largest online slots jackpots on offer. You can play the Mega-Moolah at almost any Microgaming powered casino - two of the best include Blackjack Ballroom of course, and Jackpot City.

Just a quick update to let you know that we have added an online casino tournaments page where you can keep track of current and upcoming casino tournaments. Casino tournaments can be a good way of having a fun time without risking much of your bankroll. Most cost around $10 or less to enter, and some are even free.

How do they work? It is pretty simple. You join the tournament and are given a stack of chips to play a specific game with. Your mission is to build the highest chip stack before the tournament ends. One of the reasons I like playing tournaments is I get to try a variety of different games that I would not necessarily want to risk my own bankroll with. And of course you get the thrill of betting big without actually risking a whole wad of cash.

We list the tournaments in order of their finishing time by default, but as usual our list pages are fully sortable on most of the information. Anything ending within 12 hours is marked in red so that you don't miss out.

I've hand picked a couple of good tournaments to get you started:

• Littlewoods Casino has a free tournament on the Amazing Spiderman Slot this month (March 2008), with a huge £1000 first prize, £500 for second, and £250 each to the next eight places. So get in there and give it a go - you have nothing to lose (unfortunately this one is unavailable to our friends in the USA).
• The English Harbour Group (including Super Slots, Caribbean Gold, Silver Dollar, and Millionaire casinos) has a smorgasbord to choose from - daily tournaments for blackjack, casino hold'em, slots, and video poker costing only $5 each, a daily slots freeroll, and coming up to celebrate St Patrick's Day, they have a $75000 prize pool for a tournament on The Reel Deal Slot machine, with the winner taking away $10000. Not bad for a $10 entry fee, and all are open to USA players.
• And finally, for non-US players, some of my favourite tournaments are played at the Cryptologic casinos each month. So remember to take a look at what Playboy, Intercasino, Littlewoods, and VIP casino have to offer each month.

One final thing to note is that there a a few casinos which offer "tournaments" where the winners are determined by whoever accumulates the most comp points during in a certain time. This is just another way of saying that whoever wagers the most money during the tournament time limit wins. We won't be listing any of these, as it is merely a shameless attempt to get you to gamble more in the hope you will bust your bankroll.

So check out our online casino tournaments list and try your luck.
Best of luck at the casino.

We're proud to announce that we've recently enhanced the site to cater for multiple languages. And our first "translation" if you will, is for our friends in the USA. The US Government's stance against online gambling has seen the options for players from the USA diminish somewhat. With this new system in place we're able to serve up a tailored version of the site specifically for visitors from the USA, making it easier for you to find a good place to play. So if you are a US player, update your bookmarks to http://www.casinolistings.com/us, and click on the little US flag at the top of the page. You get a different site homepage, and some articles have been changed to make the information more relevant for people from the USA. The rest of the site content is still accessible in the default English version.

For members of the site, you can even set and save your preferred language to view the site in your user profile. To get there, make sure you are registered and logged in, then click your username at the top of the screen, and click the "Edit" tab, where you can set your preferences.

We have a lot of visitors from Europe, and over time we'll be adding more language specific content in as many languages as we can find translators for. If you'd like to lend a hand then contact us and let us know what language you speak, and how fluent you are.

William Hill casino recently switched to a unique bonus scheme which they call the "unlimted new player bonus" and "unlimited monthly bonus". The bonus is determined solely by the amount you wager. It is a tiered scheme where you are paid a certain amount each time your wagerings pass a predetermined threshold. For example, once you wager £500 on their monthly bonus you earn a bonus of £25, then when your wagerings pass £5000, you earn another £25, making £50 in total.

The sign-up bonus is identical to the monthly bonus except that you receive a £10 bonus after your first £100 in wagerings, lowering the overall wagering requirements slightly.

The Good

No minimum deposit amount is required. In fact it looks like no deposit is required at all, so if you already have money in your account, you can just play with it and earn the bonus. Also, you can play pretty much any game you want in the casino, but...

The Bad

It doesn't take a genius to see that the requirements to earn the bonus get grossly worse the higher your wagers go, and wagerings on most games are in fact scaled such that they don't count at the same rate. So when William Hill says wager £500, they actually mean £500 on slots, £1000 on roulette, or £2000 on blackjack. I did a quick analysis of the various tiers to illustrate the point:

The Ugly

Claiming that players who wager over £5,000,000 on slot machines (or £20,000,000 if they prefer most other games) in a single month can earn a bonus of £10,205 is frankly taking the piss.

This is a shame because William Hill is not a bad casino at all. It is secure, backed by a solid bricks-and-mortar British company, has good software provided by Cryptologic, massive £1,000,000 jackpots and other benefits like monthly tournaments.

But as you can plainly see, their new "unlimited" bonus scheme is some kind of bad joke for regular players.

If you would like to compare the various monthly bonus offers made by online casinos then take a look at our comprehensive list of monthly and weekly casino bonuses.

BetDirect Casino offers a monthly reward of £25 after you have wagered £1250 (50xB). Blackjack and Video Poker are allowed and are the safest choices to complete the reward. Now the great thing about BetDirect's Microgaming software is that it allows autoplay for blackjack, and the strategy it uses is a great one to follow.

So deposit £25 or more then move it into the casino section and load up a Blackjack variant. Now select a £2 bet, click the "expert" mode button at the bottom of the window, and then click autoplay and configure as shown below.

You will need to complete around 550 hands, depending upon how many double and splits you go through, and then go to live support and request the reward.

Microgaming autoplay settings
BetDirect autoplay screenshot

I recently took my bankroll boosting quest over to Intercasino. Online since 1997, Intercasino is one of the most well known and respected online gaming brands in the world today. It has won a litany of awards in the ten years it has operated, and is generally regarded as one of the premier online casinos.

Intercasino offers a 100% match bonus on your first deposit, with a maximum of $100. The bonus requires either 50xB on my usual choice of games, blackjack, or 25xB on a variety of other games (I prefer Hold-em Bonus Poker) before you can make a withdrawal. Note that you need to enter a code in the cashier to get the bonus, and the code changes every month, so either check our Intercasino review for this month's code, or you can find it at Intercasino's website on the "Promotions" page.

Texas Hold'em Bonus Poker: click to enlargeWanting to try something different, I opted to clear the bonus playing Hold-em Bonus Poker. Hold-em Bonus is a card game modeled after the poker game Texas Hold'em. It is just you against the dealer (who always calls) and you have the option of raising or checking pre-flop, and then on the flop, turn, and river. If your hand beats the dealer, you win. The dealer plays no part in the game other than to always call and hold a hand which you must beat. Anyway the correct strategy for the game is far more complicated than blackjack, so you should use the Hold-em Bonus strategy calculator I found at an online poker reviews website. Using the calculator reduces the house edge to around 0.5% per unit wagered.

With a minimum ante of $2, and then another $4 to play a hand, then raising when you have a good hand pushing the stake size up to $10 on occasion, I met the wagering requirements of $2500 in under two hours. Of course, such a betting size increases the variance considerably over blackjack, so you have a greater chance of either busting or making a handsome profit. I had a good session in the end - finishing with $234 in my account, resulting in a net profit of $134.

And what is even better? Intercasino offers a monthly bonus with exactly the same conditions - i.e. 100% match up to $100. I'll definitely be back next month. And the one after...

Casino on Net (aka 888.com), established in 1997, is one of the longest running and most respected online casinos in the world. They offer a 100% bonus on deposits of up to $200, and require a modest 20xB worth of wagering before you may withdraw.

First up, let me say that I enjoyed being able to play through this one on my iMac. Generally most casinos require a windows installer, or their flash software requires Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This illustrates the little extra air of polish about Casino on Net compared to most others - in fact I'd go so far as to say it is one of the most impressive online casinos I have come across.

So I went about my regular three hands of $5 multi-hand blackjack and had a pretty average session. Never really going much above my starting balance of $400, I completed the wagering requirements with only $165 in the bank. I tried a few of 888.com's other games including video poker and red dog and lost a little more when I decided enough was enough for this session. Final balance $138.

Well after a cracking start to my quest to over-inflate my bankroll (I've gone from $100 to over $1400 after just 3 casinos), my next stop was Bet365 online casino. Bet365 uses Playtech software, the same casino software that Golden Palace uses, so the games are quick and playing through the bonus does not take long.

Bet365 offers a 100% bonus on your first deposit, up to a maximum of $200, so I deposited $200 via Neteller in order to receive the maximum. The bonus requires wagering of 24xB in order to make a withdrawal.

Well if you have been following my blog recently you'll know I've enjoyed enormous fortune so far, so it was bound to happen sooner or later that my luck would make a turn for the worse. Playing mostly three $5 hands at the multi-hand blackjack table, which is a little over my recommended 1% of your bankroll per hand, I encountered a losing streak very early and soon found myself down to around $200 from my starting $400. I fluctuated close to that total for the rest of the session and ended on $197 for a total loss of $3 on my initial deposit.

Perhaps if I had played smaller wagers I would have achieved a better result. As I said in my bonus clearing guide though, a smaller wager size can depend much on your patience and willingness to play through a large number of hands.

Next on my list of casino bonuses to boost my bankroll is Victor Chandler Casino. Similar to last week's Bankroll Boost casino Ladbrokes, Victor Chandler's online casino is just one part of a well known UK bookmaker's online presence. With a successful brick-and-mortar business backing the online casino, you can be sure it isn't a fly-by-night operation.

Now Victor Chandler gives you two choices: (a) a 100% bonus on a £250 deposit, requiring 20xB wagering; or (b) a 100% bonus on a £50 deposit, requiring only 10xB wagering. If you have read my other posts, you'll know I'm all about building my bankroll, and I have built my $100 into a mini war-chest of $813 so it's the £250 bonus for me!

£5000 is admittedly a lot of wagering so this one took me a couple of sessions spread over two evenings to complete, and interestingly enough, you can only play at Victor Chandler using your browser - there is no software to download and install. I played mainly 3x £5 hands of blackjack, although I did try another couple of games such as Jacks or Better Video Poker, Pai Gow Poker, and Casino War using small wagers to mix things up and make it more entertaining. I had a bit of a lucky streak towards the end and finished well over the expected result at £571.