The prospect of living in Zimbabwe is something of a risk at the moment, so you might think that there would be very little appetite for visiting Zimbabwe’s gambling halls. Actually, it appears to be functioning the opposite way, with the awful economic conditions leading to a bigger desire to wager, to attempt to discover a fast win, a way out of the crisis.
For almost all of the people surviving on the meager local wages, there are 2 common types of gambling, the state lottery and Zimbet. As with practically everywhere else on the planet, there is a national lotto where the probabilities of profiting are surprisingly tiny, but then the prizes are also surprisingly large. It’s been said by market analysts who look at the subject that most do not purchase a card with the rational assumption of winning. Zimbet is centered on one of the domestic or the English soccer leagues and involves predicting the outcomes of future matches.
Zimbabwe’s gambling dens, on the other foot, pander to the exceedingly rich of the society and travelers. Up until a short while ago, there was a very large vacationing business, based on nature trips and visits to Victoria Falls. The market woes and connected violence have carved into this market.
Among Zimbabwe’s casinos, there are two in the capital, Harare, the Carribea Bay Resort and Casino, which has 5 gaming tables and one armed bandits, and the Plumtree gambling hall, which has just the slots. The Zambesi Valley Hotel and Entertainment Center in Kariba also has only slots. Mutare contains the Monclair Hotel and Casino and the Leopard Rock Hotel and Casino, the pair of which have table games, slot machines and video poker machines, and Victoria Falls houses the Elephant Hills Hotel and Casino and the Makasa Sun Hotel and Casino, each of which have slot machines and tables.
In addition to Zimbabwe’s casinos and the aforestated mentioned lottery and Zimbet (which is very like a parimutuel betting system), there is a total of two horse racing tracks in the country: the Matabeleland Turf Club in Bulawayo (the 2nd metropolis) and the Borrowdale Park in Harare.
Seeing as that the market has contracted by more than 40% in recent years and with the associated poverty and crime that has arisen, it isn’t understood how healthy the vacationing business which is the backbone of Zimbabwe’s gambling dens will do in the next few years. How many of them will carry through till things get better is merely not known.