To prevent the entire nation from turning into compulsive gamblers, The Man has changed the law since I last gambled two years ago. Now you can’t use Norwegian credit or debit cards to deposit money to international gambling sites. It doesn’t matter if it’s a MasterCard or Visa card. As long as it’s issued by a Norwegian bank, no serious gambling site will accept it. Everything’s all fine and dandy if you want to use the national, state-owned lottery company, though. Then you can use any Norwegian credit and debit card. Because when you use the state-owned lottery, you don’t run the risk of getting a gambling problem, right? Riiight…

There are good intentions behind the no-international-gambling-allowed-laws, but do they actually help? I’ve not bothered to do any research, but I honestly doubt it, since the laws don’t really make a big difference. They don’t make it impossible for Norwegians to gamble on international gambling sites, it just makes it a little bit harder.

Money Transfer Services

With the help of money transfer services, it’s entirely possible to get money from a Norwegian MasterCard or Visa card to an international gambling site. Most of the gambling sites I checked accept deposits from Skrill and Neteller. I already have a Skrill account, but when I tried to log in, I was told that the account was deactivated. It’s probably because of inactivity, I haven’t touched the account in a couple of years. I sent an e-mail to Skrill support to have the account reactivated, but there probably are a couple of hoops I have to jump through to get everything sorted.

So I created a Neteller account instead. They happily accept Norwegian Visa cards, but demand a 4,95% transfer fee. Yeah, screw you, too, Neteller. Bank transfers are free, though, so I went for that. I’m going to waste all my money myself, thank you very much. I don’t need the help of high transfer fees to do that. It’ll take a couple of days before the money is on my Neteller account, though. Hopefully it will happen in time for the World Cup’s first kick off.

So How To Get Rich Quick!?

The question now is which site I’ll use to turn my NOK 1000¹ into millions and millions? In 2016, I used Unibet. Certainly not a bad choice, but I’ve blown through all my welcome bonuses. Without doing too much research, I decided to open an account on Betfair. They offer all the sports betting you’d except, plus a betting exchange if I decided to give that a try. What’s a betting exchange, you might ask yourself. Why don’t you read my handy Beginner’s Sports Betting Guide to find out?

For my first bet, I’ve decided to keep it simple. Nothing fancy, I’ll just place a bet on who wins the opening match. The first day of the World Cup sees only one match. Host nation Russia plays against the unfortunate Saudi Arabia. I have no idea how good these two teams are, but if you’ve paid any attention to how Russia have performed in other big championships they’ve hosted lately *cough*2014 Winter Olympics*cough*, of course they’ll win the match.

If I manage to get the funds transferred to Betfair in time, the plan is to put NOK 100 on Russia. The current odds are, 1.44. It’s not a lot of money to be won, but at least it’s a safe bet if I ever saw one. Unless Putin has told the Russian team to lose because he has tons of money on Saudi Arabia.

This might not be as clear-cut as I first thought.