Russia ends countrywide gambling

Tens of thousands of casinos and slot-machines across Russia shut down today as sweeping new laws confining gambling to four remote regions came into effect.

The restrictions will put an estimated 400,000 people out of work at a time when Russia’s economic crisis is deepening and unemployment is rising.

Russian TV said more than 40,000 workers were affected in Moscow alone, at 30 major casinos and 500 smaller-scale gaming halls.

Russian news agencies reported that Moscow police were checking gambling halls across the capital to make sure they were closing.

The law, passed three years ago at then-President Vladimir Putin’s initiative, confines gambling to four special zones in far-flung regions of Russia, most thousands of miles away from Moscow.

It is unclear how much support the restrictions have among everyday Russians.

Officials at some of the businesses said they would reopen as market research companies, or would rent out their valuable, often-centrally located properties.

Others were trying to skirt the law by renaming themselves as poker clubs - arguing that should be considered a “game of chance” – or as places for internet gambling, where patrons place bets but computer servers are located offsite at the distant gaming zones.

When politicians signed the casino closure law in 2006, the move backed the image Mr Putin wanted to project: that of a clean-living, workaholic president. However, analysts say the government also saw a chance to weed out a criminal element involved in the casino business.

Under the new law, casinos and slot machines will be allowed to operate only in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea; the Primorsky region on the Pacific coast; the mountainous Altai region in Siberia; and near the southern cities of Krasnodar and Rostov, host to the 2014 Sochi Olympics.