First Estonian Online Casino Opens

The first Estonian online casino has opened up to the public, just a month after the Baltic nation issued its first ever online gaming license.

Land-based casino company the Olympic Entertainment Group - which was the recipient of that license - launched its first online casino, Olympic-Online.com, with the option of playing more than 150 games in English, Russian, and of course Estonian.

The website is powered by Playtech software.

Olympic is one of the major casino operators in east Europe, employing more than two thousand people in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Romania, Poland and Slovakia.

Estonia only approved the legalization of online gambling in January, reversing a previous law that banned local servers from hosting gambling.

Under those previous regulations, sites could only be located on offshore servers. While those same offshore sites are now being blocked after the introduction of the new provisions, there are reports that condition will be dropped in 2011.