Online Casinos – Australia. Australian online casinos are big business for the Commonwealth. Oceania, a geographic area that also contains New Zealand, is one of the larger world gambling markets.
Located on the Swan River in the suburb of Burswood just outside the city of Perth, Crown Perth (operated by Crown Limited) is a hotel and casino resort complex. Linked to Perth’s Central Business District by a public railway system, the complex contains a casino, two hotels, a convention centre, many restaurants and bars, and a 20,000 seat indoor arena called The Dome.
The Crown’s casino is open twenty-four hours a day. On the casino games floor, twelve table games are open at any given time. The Crown’s table game variety includes a few variants of blackjack, roulette (on single-zero and double-zero wheels), electronic versions of casino standards in the Rapid series (Rapid Roulette, Rapid Baccarat, Rapid Money Wheel), three variants of baccarat, casino-style poker games like Casino War, Texas Hold’Em, and Caribbean Stud Poker, Two-Up, Sic Bo, and Pai Gow.
Poker players who visit the Crown complex can participate in weekly No Limit Hold ‘Em tournaments with buy-ins as low as AUD $50 or play in ring games from noon to 6 AM during the week or twenty-four hours on Fridays and Saturdays.
The casino’s collection of electronic machine games totals just under 2,000, though traditional pokies or any reel-spinning games are not legal in Western Australia. (See our page about pokies facts for more information about these kinds of games.) In place of pokies, the casino offers skill games like video poker and machine versions of keno, along with other skill games that are hybrids of table games and video poker machines. Wagers on these games range from AUD $0.10 up to the high-roller level available on machines in the casino’s VIP section. Bets on these VIP games go up into the hundreds of dollars per round. A separate keno lounge located next to the casino’s sports bar operates around the clock available at a wide variety of bet sizes on both table versions of the game and electronic portals.
VIPs and special guests have their own gaming area, the Pearl Room, with a 180 degree view of the Perth skyline and the Swan River. All the games found on the casino floor, except for head-to-head poker, have high-roller versions in the Pearl Room where bet minimums hover around the AUD $50 mark. Complimentary beverages and game hosts serving VIP guests are available in this by-invite only section of the Crown casino.
According to a government report, the Database on Australia’s Gambling Industry, a little more than 80% of adults in Australia participate in some form of wagering. That number makes Australians the most active bettors in the world, with easy access to bookmakers, betting on horse and dog races, pokies in clubs and bars, and the country’s many traditional casinos, not to mention legal and regulated online gambling.
The government agency that controls gambling in this territory is the Office of Racing, Gaming and Liquor. That group licenses and regulates all gaming machines and table games at Crown Perth, and is responsible for the auditing of all the games of chance and skill in the Crown casino-resort complex as well as in clubs and bars that make pokies and other machine games available in WA.
It wasn’t until 1974 that the government of Western Australia considered regulating and legalizing casino play, citing the fact that organized crime groups were already running illegal casino operations within territorial boundaries. The potential increase in tourism to the area was another major factor, and eventually the territory decided to pass legislation allowing for the construction of a casino in Perth, the framework that would eventually lead to the construction of the Crown Perth.
The city of Perth is the major destination for travellers to WA. Perth is a major cosmopolitan city, the fourth-largest in all of Australia, with museums, performance halls, and cultural sites draw in in hundreds of thousands of international tourists every year.
Though the climate is generally dry and much of the territory is uninhabited, the northern tropical regions of the state are home to a diverse collection of wildlife, as is the southwest coastal area (home to Perth) which has a more comfortable Mediterranean climate.
Revenue from tourism (and from poker machines) continue to increase, thanks in part to places like the Crown Perth that take advantage of the size of the territory’s capital city and its many landmarks and tourist-friendly destinations to draw in business. Gambling regulations in Western Australia do allow for the construction of other casino resort complexes in the state, though so far Crown Perth has a monopoly on the territory’s casino industry.