A year after the French government amended the country’s gambling law in a manner that paved the way for shared liquidity negotiations, the first agreement for the creation of an online poker network between several regulated jurisdictions will be signed.
The gambling regulators of France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain will formalize the product of their year-long discussions on July 6, 2017 in Rome. The move will set the basis that will guide the four countries through the complex process of merging their online poker player pools. Penning the agreement, regulatory bodies from the participating jurisdictions will then have to take a number of important steps in order for the shared liquidity project to yield positive results and hopefully improve the state of European online poker.
As mentioned above, the French government, urged by the local regulator – ARJEL – was the great initiator of the endeavor. The country’s online poker market was regulated in 2010. However, high taxes and rake turned it into a rather unattractive one. France did attract some major poker operators, PokerStars included, but players did not seem particularly comfortable with what the regulated environment had to offer them. As a result, the market never turned a big profit and never managed to meet bright expectations for a continued growth.
Here it is also important to note that all four participating countries have opted for ring-fenced markets instead of allowing players to join EU licensed pools. The restrictions were also among the main reasons that affected the popularity and profitability of regulated online poker.
In a similar fashion, the online poker markets of Spain and Italy did not produce the desired effect of boosting their overall gambling industries. Of all four participating countries, Portugal was the one to regulate online gambling most recently. It was late last year when PokerStars was issued the country’s first online poker license. And the operator has so far remained the only one to provide this type of offering to Portuguese players.
The country’s too heavy taxation regime has already begun causing trouble as local players, among other involved parties, have been urging the government to review laws and replace them with ones that would make the market more attractive. Portuguese lawmakers have been quite stubborn in their decision to probe into the market two years after its establishment. This means that if they maintain their current stance, a review will not be carried out before May 2018.
Many see the shared liquidity project as the last resort for ring-fenced European online poker, but it is too early for any firm statements about its success.
It is believed that now, as the first shared liquidity agreement is set to be signed, the first online poker network will be created and launched by the year’s end or early in 2018. However, regulators of the four participating countries will still have a lot to discuss in order to be able to fit in that time period.
Taxation may turn out to be a major setback in upcoming negotiations, as all four countries feature different regimes for taxing online poker. The good news is that regulators are clearly open to discussion and compromise.
