For those of you lucky enough to have visited tropical Costa Rica, your most vivid memories are probably of beautiful beaches or beautiful mountains or perhaps beautiful ladies. You may have even been really fortunate and seen a toucan or a scarlet macaw in your travels. You probably didn’t notice the sportsbooks & pay per head shops located there although it would have been hard to miss the land based casinos which are located in almost every large hotel and resort in the country. For the thousands of tourists who visit Costa Rica each year the subject of wagering on sports never even comes up. However, SportsBooks, Price Per Head Services, Casinos and Wagering on Sports are a huge business in this otherwise sleepy tropical paradise.
Wagering on Sports is a legal and licensed enterprise in Costa Rica and employs thousands of people both male and female in every position from computer techs to wagering operators plus all the other positions necessary to run such a complicated operation. Education is a high priority in Costa Rica so SportsBooks and PPH Services alike are able to draw from a large pool of well educated, English speaking clerks to staff the phone centers and internet rooms. Players and Bookmakers both enjoy dealing with these people and very seldom have any problem understanding the Costaricans or making themselves understood.
Cost Per Head Services and SportsBooks are mostly located in nice office complexes up in the cool central valley of Costa Rica and in general they are not very exotic. Hollywood however, seems to be able to pull an exotic story out of even the most mundane setting.
Now we hear that a new multimillion dollar movie will be made concerning the Offshore Wagering Industry down in Costa Rica. None other than Leonardo DiCaprio is reported to be the headliner with super model Giselle Bundchen sharing the spotlight.
Paramount Pictures and the writing team from Ocean’s Thirteen will undertake a saga based on the Costa Rica Poker, Casino and Offshore Sports Betting Industry. The country closed down the major Poker Rooms in the country such as Absolute Poker several years ago after one too many scandals arose concerning the propriety of the games themselves. The major part of the current Offshore Wagering Industry which consists of Sports Books, which deal mostly with day to day players (gamblers) and Pay Per Head Services, which deal exclusively with Professional Bookmakers. PPH Services also provide line management and risk management services to their clients and have seen a rapid growth in demand for their services in the past few years due to the new found convenience they can offer to the Modern Internet Bookie.
Film writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien have portrayed a similar underground casino and illegal betting related story in their excellent script for “The Rounders,” which starred Edward Norton and Matt Damon as high-stakes players in the underground scene in the USA. Land based Casinos and High Stakes Poker Rooms can be found through Costa Rica.
No details are known about the story line at this point but the scene is ripe with possibilities.
Exotic settings, beautiful women and a wide variety of colorful characters will make for fertile ground for the writers. Throw in a few monkeys and some multicolored tropical birds and the scene is complete. This should be a really good movie!
