Honestly, it feels like it took a while both for South Africa to realise that online casinos existed, and for online casinos to realise South Africans were playing at them. But the cat is well and truly out of the bag now, and there are a huge range of South African online casinos to choose from.

Well, perhaps that statement is misleading. Bizarrely, there are in fact no online casinos based in South Africa. This is largely because South Africa currently has no legislation either permitting or prohibiting online gambling.

But our government has been making rumblings for a while now about introducing laws to license and regulate the practise, so most local business who are interested in launching their own South African online casinos appear to be hanging back to see what these laws will look like before investing in a site that turns out to have legal difficulties.

In the meantime, when we speak about South African online casinos, we're talking either about online casinos set up just outside our borders (such as Swaziland or Lesotho) that are tailor made for the South African market, or major international casinos that have realised we like to play, and have begin explicitly welcoming us.

This last point is, in my opinion, actually the most interesting, for a number of reasons. You see, online casinos have actually existed since about 1994, and have been growing in number every year. Most of them are quite location-neutral, but tend to be explicitly faced at either an American or European audience.

This meant that if you wanted to play at one of them, you had to have access to US Dollars, Pounds or Euros, and means of getting them to and from the casino, which actually put up an access barrier to many less tech-savvy people.

But things have begun to shift, as more and more of the major international and publicly traded companies (not really small fish, in other words) have started waking up to the fact that South Africans like to gamble online and are happy to do so provided they don't make it too hard for us.

In practical terms, what this has meant is that we are now seeing major casinos building South African specific front ends, and starting to accept South African rands both as a means of funding your casino account, and also as a currency that you can play in at the virtual tables and slots.

Casinos that make this specific effort are those that I refer to as South African online casinos – online venues that understand us, understand our specific needs, and tailor their offerings to better serve us. I feel strongly that such gaming establishments deserve our support far more than those that only allow us to play in dollars.

And the reason is that for most of us, online gambling is something we do for fun – it's light entertainment with a bit of spice. As such, it's not supposed to be a major banking hassle. So, whether you looking to Roulette, Blackjack, Poker or Slot machines with massive Jackpots, South African online casinos have it all, and more.