GAMING FOR AFRICA
Gaming For Africa
Casino International’s Africa partner is the excellent Gaming For Africa magazine, bringing you the continent’s latest developments
In Conversation with SunBet General Manager, Nitesh Matai
Sun International’s SunBet General Manager Nitesh Matai discusses the intricacies of online betting, whether online gambling is legal, and the difference between online betting and online gambling.
Q: Firstly, is online gambling legal? NM: First we need to distinguish between the different types of betting and gaming. Gambling as an overall concept in South Africa, can be broken down into sports betting and then online casinos. Sports betting and our sports betting licenses are granted as fixed-odds bookmaker licenses. Fixed- odds bookmaker licenses allow us to offer bets on contingencies that are based on live events with a fixed outcome. So, let’s take one step back and understand what a fixed-odds outcome is – it is an outcome that you can estimate at the time that you are placing your bet. A standard example would be a Liverpool versus Man United match. The odds are published so at the time you place your bet, you are able to calculate what your pay-out will be should your chosen team win. This is a standard win-lose bet. If you bet on Man
United and they win, you’ll win X amount of rand. If Liverpool wins, you will lose your bet. The outcome is predictable as the odds are determined at the time at which you place your bet. The difference between betting and illegal online
Q: Nitesh, please tell us a bit about SunBet? Nitesh Matai: Since 2013, we have been the very proud sports betting arm of Sun International. We were a small part of the overarching business,
however, we were the one business unit that COVID-19 had a positive impact on, in that we saw growth during that time. People were obviously at home during lockdown, bored, with nothing to do, so, our role as an entertainment provider grew exponentially from there. That was the catalyst for us to add more products to our offering. Sports betting is still our key product line, but we’ve added a whole host of new products, and we are continuing to add more.
22 AUGUST 2021
gambling played in online casinos, is that with the casinos you have a computer-generated random outcome. If you put R10 000 into a slot machine you don’t know what the outcome will be. You’re not betting on one eventuality, you’re betting on multiple eventualities, the odds are not fixed, and the eventuality you are hoping for may never happen. But it becomes interesting when you end up in a
situation where a roulette game does have a fixed-odds outcome. For example, a roulette table has 37 squares, you can bet on any one of those 37 squares coming up. And you can bet on red or black, on rows or columns. You can bet on odds and evens. And all those odds are determined upfront. If you bet R1 000 on 11, and it comes up, you will win R35 000
plus you will receive your R1 000 bet back. In this case, the odds are fixed with a predictable outcome, which is how we are able to offer games like live roulette on our on SunBet platform. Roulette has a predictable outcome, Blackjack has a predictable outcome, and Baccarat has a predictable outcome. Therefore, all of these games fit within the ambit of our fixed sports betting license, as long as they are based on a live event. This started way back in the day with horse racing.
You knew your odds when you placed your bet, and you knew what you would win if your horse placed. It’s a hop, skip and a jump to other sports like tennis, table tennis, sumo wrestling, drone racing, and all number of exotic sports.
Q: Why isn’t online gambling legal in South Africa? NM: In what became a landmark case, the Bloemfontein Supreme Court of Appeals ruled in 2011 that online gambling in South Africa was illegal. Government subsequently promised to publish regulations for online gambling but so far, despite millions of rands and man hours spent, government has yet to publish regulations. We keep being promised them and we keep being disappointed. Where we are in that process is anybody’s guess. We haven’t even seen a white paper on the gambling regulations. I’m assuming that somebody, somewhere, has been tasked with coming up with this with these regulations. However, what is interesting is that the only thing that
we’re not offering right now that you can get from casinos that are offering online gambling are slot machines. We can offer all the other games because they all have fixed-odds and are based on a live game. We plug into software that certain companies run out of studios. The software is plugged into a game that is happening live in a studio somewhere in the world. For Roulette, for example, they have sensors that are able to
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