Costa Rica: beans, beaches, babes and chips

Here are couple of things you probably already know about Costa Rica.

It has plenty of beaches…over 200 km of coastline facing the Caribbean Sea to East and over 1000 km facing the Pacific Ocean to the West.

It also has an amazing year-round tropical climate to go with all those beaches. The coastal lowland average high in March is 28°C.  In June it’s 27°C.  October dips to a chilly 26°C.  It then warms to 27°C  in January.   Every other month is somewhere between 26 and 28!

No surprises it’s a mecca for beach-combers…many of whom would go there to comb the beach for sights like the one pictured above.

Here are a few things you may not have known.

Costa Rica’s home-grown arabica coffee beans are considered to be up there with finest produced anywhere in the world. Until chips came along, coffee was this country’s largest export industry.  Which leads me onto the second fact you may not know…a whopping 20% of total exports now comprise chips. Not potato or casino…micro.

Yep, there’s a chance the ‘intel inside’ your computer came out of one of Intel’s Costa Rican micro-processor manufacturing plants which are now responsible for nearly 5% of the country’s total GDP.

Costa Rica has no army.  It’s the happiest and greenest country on earth according to New Economics Foundation and it has a coat of arms that seems more suitable for Peter Pan’s Neverland than a 21st century nation state.

Sounds like a pretty cool place to be huh?

That’s certainly what quite a few live dealer software developers think because many are setting up shop, or rather studio there. It’s like the Latvia of Central America.

CWC Gaming have had a dealer studio there for some time.  Visionary iGaming decided that it was the ideal place to base their operations, and HoGaming have even done a stint there…until they incurred the wrath local of authorities after breaching labour laws (stiffed their dealers on payments and social security benefits) and were asked to leave. There are also a host of lesser known, US-facing operations like Global Gaming Labs that call Costa Rica home.

When it comes to internet gambling regulation, it’s fair to say Costa Rica has never been accused of being the most stringently regulated of jurisdictions. Interestingly however, the labour component (ie dealer staff) necessary for live dealer operations has attracted oversight from the Ministerio de Trabajo (Labour Ministry), Caja Costaricense de Seguro Social (Costa Rican Social Security Caja) and Instutito Nacional de Seguros (National Institute of Insurance).

According to a representative from CWC Gaming, as the number of Costa Rican live dealers has grown, so too have levels of government oversight.

“…due to an increased number of studios being placed in Costa Rica, the government has increased the amount of controls on the casino industry. We are proud to say that we are always compliant with any new legislation the Costa Rican government places on our industry. We have seen various studios set up in Costa Rica fail due to these new stricter rules “