Gambling, as you may be well aware, is banned in most regions in Asia – or at the very least heavily restricted, with only a very limited selection of activities (ex. a few types of sports betting or government-sponsored lotto) being available to the public. The Philippines, on the other hand, despite being located near some very gambling-conservative countries such as Vietnam (which, despite high hopes, still treats gamblers like criminals), is one of the more liberal havens for gamblers on the continent. In one of my previous articles, I compared the Philippines to the UK when it came to market size, availability and methods of certification, and even today I still don’t think that description was that far from the truth. Honestly, I didn’t even suspect just how big gambling was in the Philippines until I sat down, turned my VPN on to a server in the country and began doing some serious research.
At first glance, things don’t appear to be too advanced. If you take a look at the Wikipedia page detailing all of the casinos in the Philippines, you’d only see a little more than a dozen within the entire country, which is rather pathetic – I mean, I’m fairly certain that a small Eastern European country would have more than that! But once you start digging deeper, you’d find out that the Wikipedia pages are horribly outdated. When I did my own research, I managed to discover over 40 gambling venues across the country. This includes numerous standalone casinos, as well as casinos that are attached to hotels and things like resorts and slot arcades. And sure, 40 may still not sound like too much to most people, especially when compared to the UK’s a lot more impressive 140, but that’s only because, unlike almost everywhere else, most people prefer to do their gambling online rather than live. And that’s where things get really interesting.
For the purposes of this article, I really wanted to register for a Philippines-exclusive online casino using some made-up information and then test out some of their games in demo mode to see just how different they are from the ones that European and American casinos have. However, I was quite surprised to find out that there really weren’t any Philippines-exclusive online casinos, at least none that I could actually discover and register for. Instead, all of the casinos I found were international, and most were UK-based. A good chunk of the online casinos on https://www.bestcasinosites.net/ are fully playable in the Philippines, legally. As I found out, the Philippines government actually requires foreign operators to register for a license and then taxes all winnings made by people within the country, and as a result it’s a lot cheaper for the government to just license foreign casinos rather than to assist in certifying local ones.
So, that’s about the extent of my experience with the casino market in the country! Sadly, I can’t really do much else without physically going to the Philippines, but I hope that this little recap of what I found was at least somewhat useful to you. With that said, as always, happy gambling!
