With the Winter Olympics in full swing (or is that full slide? Or skate? Or ski?) and a plethora of fantastic tournaments and matches on the horizon – not least being the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar – we are torn between spending our time on cricket or Formula 1 or rugby or our online casino love – the slots.

We South Africans have a ton of things we are famous for: our beautiful country, our cuisine, our innovations, our sexy accents, our love of taking chances, and our sport. Some of our best and brightest ambassadors out there are sportspeople who have risen to the tops of their game. From cricket to rugby to swimming to soccer to tennis, we even have a few NFL players (and one very famous one, Gary Anderson, who was born and bred right here on our shores – or at least on the shores of the rivers of Parys).

With sport being such a huge part of daily South African lives, and online and mobile gambling rising to never-before-seen levels, we at Online Casino Review were curious as to whether there were good options for sports fans in the online casino world. We are all well aware of the sports betting options out there but sometimes we just want to enjoy our favourite team or individual competing without the extra stress of having money on the line. And we love online slots. So, is there a way of merging our favourite sport and our favourite pastime?

Surprisingly, yes! Look, we all know and enjoy Frankie Dettori’s horse racing online slots game, it’s super fun and quite cleverly done, but we’ve never actually gone out and looked for slots that incorporate sports as such. We’ve played tons of PlayStation and Xbox sports games, we’ve dabbled in the virtual sports betting world and fantasy leagues, but we’ve never tried our hand on a sports slot.

And, boy, were we pleasantly surprised!

What are online sports slots?

Put simply, online sports slots are out favourite casino games given a sports theme. In the above-mentioned Frankie Dettori slots game (Frankie Dettori’s Magic Seven) Playtech have taken a world-famous jockey’s exploits and turned them into a 5-reel, 25 payline online slots game where players can relive the historic events of Frankie Dettori riding all seven winners to victory at Ascot.

But there are far more online slots for south African players that feature sports.

The beauty of online slots and the digital casino world is that it only takes a bit of ingenuity, design, and programming to bring players new and exciting themes and features in a format that is quickly understood and thrilling to play.

In the sports-themed slots world that translates to hundreds of slot with hundreds of different sports on offer. Much like a movie theme or a music theme or a Viking theme or an archaeologist theme, the sports themed slots can vary from 3-reel to 5-reel to standard fruit machine to cascading reels – and, of course, the rules of sports tend to enable a host of interesting features for the player.