I've been in the online gambling industry for a while and I noticed that it's relying more and more on the Flash Platform. The applications created by online gambling companies have large budgets and use state of the art technology. They usually have dedicated User Experience professionals who make sure the application looks and feels right to the customers. After all, the most important thing is to make the users feel good and you won't succeed that if they can not find the sounds off button.

Live betting
There isn't a sports punter in the world who can say that they don't like to bet after the event has started. Nothing compares to watching the game on TV and waiting for the price to reach your target. In this kind of applications data synchronization between the server and the client application is crucial and sometimes 1 second of delay can mean thousands of bets have to be canceled. There's no need to add that this is bad for business.


Examples:
Bodog live betting
You can choose from 3 types of bets, the application resizes vertically to show in more markets and the odds change very fast.
Bet365
The live game events is a great way to stay in touch with what's happening if you're not watching the game.

Lobby
Because online gambling companies sometimes have a lot of games the offer, there is an increasing need for lobby applications which can present the games to the user and allow him to launch them with just one click.

Examples:
Betfair Casino
Great 3D look and very good matching sounds.
Bwin Poker
Gorgeous black shiny skin, very complex and with a lot of features. It has multiple levels of filtration combining tabs, comboboxes and checkboxes.


Demos
Believe it or not some of these games are extremely complex and complicated so a demo presentation helps the user understand the rules and the gameplay. Since Flash is the de-facto standard for online animations and sounds, it made sense to use it for the demos.

Examples:
Bwin Poker Demo
Even if you haven't played poker in your lifetime after a few minutes of this demo you are good to start. It's really nice because it simulates the real game and the users get used to the rules and to the game interface.

Live dealer
I started this post promising you state of the art technology and maybe you haven't seen it until now, but keep reading. Live dealer is a new offering from the betting companies where you basically have a video conference connection with a real cards dealer. This makes you feel more like in a real casino while keeping the advantages of online gambling.

Examples:
William Hill live casino
Very easy to use and with different view points.
Games, video sharing, live video feeds, etc....
There is no need to tell you that all the web games in this industry (poker, casino, slots) are flash applications. This is mainly because Flash delivers high quality graphics and user experience while allowing for fast reliable communication with the server.
I'm not going to go into details about the games now, I can tell you there are thousands of them and from someone on the inside I can tell you they are not rigged. They are all based on random algorithms.
Tutorial videos and live video feeds started to show up more often on the gambling websites and Flash was the only way to deliver them to all the customers. Aside from this I have seen utility flash applications that are used purely for storing cross-browser cookies (SharedObject) and for communicating across domains.

The online gambling websites use the Flash platform to deliver richer experiences to their customers which in the end is crucial for their business. Now let's see them go mobile!


Feel free to add comments and links to other examples that I might have missed.

This blog post is NOT an ad for any of the products presented here and the images without a source are a simple screenshot of the products as they looked at the time of writing this article.