There’s an ancient Greek temple, a Caribbean seaside resort, a spaceship, an Egyptian pyramid and a riverboat from the deep South. You can play blackjack, all the variations of poker, baccarat, craps, roulette, keno, scratch cards and slot machines to your heart’s desire. Best of all, you can wager real money or play just for fun, without betting one cent.
Welcome to the dazzling world of online gambling, where you can win really big and lose even more – and you don’t have to leave the comfort of your own home.
If you have access to the Internet, finding a casino to suit your needs is easy. At Gambling.com (), you can find links to gambling establishments, information on downloading gaming software and reviews of online casinos.
Once you’ve registered an account and installed the software, just give the casino your credit card number and you’re ready to gamble.
Getting information on the legality of online gambling is not that simple, however. None of the lawyers contacted by Smart Money was prepared to comment, saying that gambling in general is a highly specialised field, and online gambling even more so.
The casino sites all carry wordy disclaimers to the tune that gambling laws differ from country to country, and it is the user’s responsibility to find out whether using the online casinos would be illegal.
Many of these casinos are registered in the Channel Islands or countries like the Dominican Republic, where the laws pertaining to money matters are more lenient than, say, in the United States.
The US Senate recently voted 90 to 10 to outlaw Internet gambling because it is impossible to regulate and might encourage children to gamble with their parents’ money. Consequently, the European Union is also studying gambling regulations to determine whether common legislation is needed for EU member states.
Whether the ban will ever be put into place remains to be seen, considering the US’s inability to ban pornography from the Internet, and the insistence on absolute freedom of expression and information from the cybercommunity.
In South Africa, online gambling doesn’t seem to be much of an issue yet. None of the Internet cafes visited by Smart Money had even thought of banning virtual gambling at their establishments, although all of them had signs up prohibiting pornography.
Most of the cafe supervisors had never heard of online casinos, but all of them were more than willing to help with the downloading and installation procedures.
However, in a country where a limited number of casino licenses were only recently awarded to those companies who met the legislation’s stringent standards, the powers that be won’t be able to ignore virtual casinos for long.
South Africa is one of the continent’s most advanced countries in information technology. Considering that the number of online casinos has doubled in the past year, concerned Internet users are sure to fire up a controversy some time soon.
According to Christo Henning, representative for the South African Revenue Service, gambling legislation in this country is the domain of provincial legislatures, and online casinos’ earnings will be taxed according to each province’s regulations.
Gambling winnings, however, are not taxable in South Africa, as long as you’re not a career gambler. Although he doesn’t know of any current governmental discussions on the implications of virtual casinos, he predicts that one of the biggest problems with online gambling will be determining, for tax purposes, if the gambler is professional or not.
“The question is how to regulate [online gambling]. As with anything to do with the Internet, it is very difficult to manage and to keep track of who is gambling,” he says.
If you’re willing to gamble with the uncertainty surrounding Internet casinos, however, the world is your virtual oyster.
The River Belle (), an online casino with a Southern riverboat theme, is one of Gambling.com’s top five sites and a featured link on GameMaster. To play, you have to install the 4,412 megabytes of gaming software, which doesn’t cost anything but can take quite some time to download, especially if your system is none too fast.
Like most of the gaming software, it is not yet Macintosh compatible, and requires Windows 3.1 or Windows 95/NT. Although the site provides detailed instructions on downloading and installing, inexperienced users may find the process daunting. If you can’t manage on your own, contact the River Belle’s technical department, the Captain’s Cabin, for help.
Meanwhile, you will also have to register with River Belle to open an account as a “stowaway” playing for fun or a real client playing for money.
The River Belle registering process is comprehensive, and you need to supply your full name, country of residence, telephone numbers, with international dialling codes, and an e-mail address (River Belle does not accept free e- mail addresses like Hotmail or Yahoo). If you’re playing for real, it also requires your credit card and banking details.
Once your registration has been accepted, the Captain’s Cabin will e- mail your account number and password to you almost immediately and you can start playing … if you are not in South Africa, that is.
River Belle will let you register with nary a word of warning, but when you try to use the software you have so laboriously installed, it tells you that your system has “locked out” your account.
An e-mail query to the Captain’s Cabin will elicit an answer, about two days later, that River Belle apologises for the inconvenience, but it does not accept any players from South Africa “at this stage”.
So what is available to South Africans? A comprehensive list of accessible online casinos can be found at The Ultimate Collection of Windows Software (). Tucows provides information on the games to be played, the size of the gaming software, system requirements and mini-reviews.
Downloading the gaming software need not be difficult. At the Acropolis (), for instance, the 1,8 megabytes of software downloads in about 15 minutes, in one easy step, and installs without any trouble, automatically creating an icon in the directory of your choice. If you’re playing for fun, you don’t even need to be connected to the Net, which saves a lot of online time and money.
To register with the Acropolis requires only your name and an e-mail address (free e-mail included), and you immediately get your account number and the password of your choice. If you’re playing for real, you’ll also have to provide your credit card and banking details.
Playing is easy, with detailed “help” functions for every game. The Acropolis has Black Jack, roulette, video poker, pai gow poker and baccarat, all played to the tune of a Viennese waltz.
Sporting fans can try out some spread- betting sites, like City Index, at . The site provides a detailed introduction to this rather complicated wagering process, with explanations and examples to help the uninitiated spend their cash or credit.