Latvia Online Casinos

Latvia is a former member of the Soviet Union, a small country with a population of 1 986 096, data of 2015. It does have their own official language, Latvian, even if most people also speak Russian. It’s located in the Baltic Sea, bordering with Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, and Russia. The country which capital is Riga has over 3000 lakes and 12000 rivers. It belongs to the European Union since May 2004, and the currency is the Euro since 2014.

Legislation

The independence of the country happened at the beginning of the ’90s, and since then gambling has increased, but until 1998 this happened in an unregulated way.

The entity that regulates gambling in Latvia is the Lotteries and Gambling Supervisory Inspection (IAUI) that until 2013 had issued 17 licenses. The overall turnover for the gambling activity reached 180 million Euro in 2012, most of it coming from slot machines.

Considering that Latvia is a small country, the existence of 5 casinos and 327 gaming places, along with 8149 slots, says a lot about the interest of the population in gambling.

Gambling Online

Online gambling was legalized in 2003, and that required that all the sites operating until then in an unregulated way, had to get licenses and pay 10% taxes on revenues.

From that date on, unlicensed sites were actively targeted by the government, and their IP addresses banned. Surely that banning a site is not an easy job due to the nature of the internet, but the intention is clear.

On the other hand, the more than 160 licensed sites in the country are in a privileged position because they will not pay the new fee, as they are already operating. Among these sites, we find some that have available Latvian as language.

This is an excellent scenario for the online gambling market, because if we consider that 8 out of 10 people in the country use the internet, and with the growth of usage of tablets and smartphones, online casinos will simply continue to grow.

Along with the access to technology, promotions, jackpots, bonuses, a wide diversity of games, mobile and live casinos, are just some of the aspects that make gambling online an engaging experience. The safety of deposit systems puts the experience at another level.

Where to gamble online in Latvia

As we have seen above, in Latvia players have available both licensed casinos, as well as unlicensed ones, so at the end of the day, this means plenty of choices. It happened a change in the legal age to gamble, increasing from 18 to 21 years old.

As most the population speaks Russian, it’s not strange that most casinos are in Russian too, wasn’t this the official language of Latvia a couple of decades ago. Among the available casinos, we also find some in Latvian though. Here we list a few quality casinos.

Euro Palace	Video Slots	Guts Casino
Royal Panda	Royal Vegas	Mr Green