Official language: Russian
Population: 142,008,838
Currency: Rouble (RUB)
Current Exchange Rate
1 EUR = 43.4766 RUB
1 GBP = 47.2465 RUB
1 USD = 28.9767 RUB
Casinos in Russia
Casinos in the Russian Federation have had a difficult time during the last few years. For most of the last century, gambling was not legal. Only in the late 1980s did this begin to change and casinos began to be built. Lack of gambling regulations let the casino industry grow out of control very quickly. By 2006, there were 58 casinos, 2,000 gaming halls, and 70,000 slot machines in Moscow alone. Slot machines could be found everywhere, even in grocery stores and apartment building lobbies.
Regulation began just a few years ago. In October of 2006, President Vladimir Putin submitted a bill that moved all gambling halls, casinos, and slot machines in the country to four specially-designated gambling regions. The move was completed in early 2009. Now, the only casinos in the Russian Federation are located in the Kaliningrad region by the Baltic Sea, the Primorye region in the Far East, Altai in Siberia and an area in the south spanning the Rostov and Krasnodar regions.
Online Casinos in Russia
Online gambling has not yet been addressed by the government of the Russian Federation. They give no licenses to operate online casinos, so there are no locally-hosted sites that offer internet casino gambling. Russians who wish to play at online casinos must therefore use offshore sites that are operated by foreign companies and hosted in places where online gambling is legal.
While most of these offshore sites are just in English, a few of the larger sites do cater to a Russian audience. They offer a full Russian translation of their main site making it easy for Russian players to play online casino games. The popularity of these sites, and of online gaming in general, is sure to increase over the next few years since the gambling halls and casinos that local players used to use have now moved away.
There are 133 Russian online casinos that offer gameplay in English or Russian and accept wagers in Euro or Russian Rouble or US Dollars
