Gambling Down Mexico Way

One thing I like doing as the weather starts cooling down is to plan next year’s vacation.  Somehow, knowing that I have a concrete plan in mind regarding next year’s getaway helps me get through the depressing winter months.  The family seems to have their heart set on Mexico next year, each one bringing a good reason of why it makes sense to travel down south.  I have no objection, as long as I can get some recreational gambling in, which led me to do some reading about the options available to me.

First of all, the gambling industry is pretty liberal in Mexico although it hasn’t always been that way.  It is only in recent years that Mexico has rolled out legal casino, poker, bingo and sports book opportunities, and there are plans to have around 35 casinos set up in the country, most of them situated on the joint border with the United States as most of the visitors to these gambling establishments are American tourists.

Gambling was allowed quite freely in Mexico until the first few decades of the twentieth century.  In 1935, the reformist president Lazaros Cardenos came into power and set his eyes on strangling the country’s gambling industry.  All this peaked in 1946 when he declared a total ban on gambling in the country.  Today, as I said, all this has changed.

When it comes to online gambling, this pastime has been around since 2002, when the government provided gambling licenses to a number of companies to offer their games and products online.  The downside for the locals, however, is that the online gambling sites are not open to them – only to foreign players, which doesn’t help Mexicans who want to take their gambling onto the internet.  Luckily for them, there are hundreds of off-shore online gambling sites who allow Mexicans to open accounts and play the games.  More software groups than ever are producing their games in Spanish to serve this growing market of players, and there should be no problem for Mexican online gamblers to find top quality, safe online casinos to play.