Russia looking for a bigger piece of the online casino pie

The Russina online casino market might well operate in an absolutely grey area, nevertheless internet gambling is accelerating fast in Russia as established operators rush to get on the bandwagon.

Russia gaming regulators to not specifically include or exclude online services in their terms of licensing for land-based operators and no separate internet license is yet available.

Though telecoms infrastructure may still be patchy, bandwidth is cheap, and Russian players, the statistics suggest, spend long periods online. Consequently, two of the country's leading slot operators are working on internet casino projects. Sergey Kuzmine, CEO of Ritzio group, says that: "Ritzio is actively evaluating opportunities to enter the online market."

Meanwhile, Michael Boettcher's Storm Casinos are within weeks of opening the Storm online operation.

Peter Speight, director of Storm's online operations, says: "Support is very big in the Russian market. We estimate there are now 34 Russian language casinos on the internet, of which about 14 or 15 have customer support lines that appear to be operational."

But while Russian language sites are springing up, few are chosing to locate in the Russian Federation itself. Operators could, feasibly, base their servers in any region with a relatively tolerant local gaming authority, but tellingly, perhaps, the best-known Russian language online casino, goldfishka.ru, operates from the Kanhawake reservation in Canada. Storm's casino will be hosted in Caracao.

Only one region of Russia, a small autonomous Asian region called Kalmikia, on the Caspian Sea, has actually attempted to implement internet casino licensing, but lack of infrastructure there has meant that even small operators have chosen to stay closer to the main cities where bandwidth is abundant, or else locate to offshore jurisdictions familiar with the needs of online casinos.

A look at the Russian pages of sites like Goldfishka.ru reveals another fundamental difference with the Russian market. Gone are the Familiar Firepay and Neteller logos and in their place the most frequently used payment services are the domestic versions provided by Yandex, Web Dollar and Rapida.