05/07/2010, Casino

On 1st of July 2009, Vladimir Putin described gambling as “worse than alcoholism” and passed a law against it. Russia made all online gambling activities illegal and restricted bricks-and-mortar casino games to the Krasnodar, Kaliningrad, Altai and Vladivostok regions.

The lack of infrastructure and investment in these areas discouraged both investors and clients. Now the wealthy Russian gamblers prefer to go abroad and the travel agencies even specialized in gambling offers which include airplane tickets and four star hotel packages in Las Vegas.

One year later, the Russian's draconian ban on casino games has only managed to move gambling underground. There, the gambling market is still prospering.
“Slot machine businesses were shut down 12 months ago. Regrettably, the majority of them were replaced with so-called 'lottery machines',” said Olga Golubeva, executive secretary of the Moscow Government's Interdepartmental Commission for Gambling Business. Since there is no law to define the requirements of the lottery equipment or lottery software, business owners obtain their certificates confirming that their old equipment is, in fact, a lottery equipment.

RT news, a Russian multilingual television news network, published a report on illegal gambling. An anonymous gambler told the RT reporter that he has been gambling for about 10 years and that since the law came into force, on the 1st of July 2009, nothing really changed because people still know where to go if they want to gamble.