French online poker operator Winamax announced last week that it has welcomed a pair of popular poker players to its Team Winamax. Italy’s Mustapha Kanit and Spain’s Adrian Mateos Diaz have become the latest stars of European poker to join the elite company of professionals who are promoting the brand as its ambassadors.
The announcement comes just as Winamax is preparing for the upcoming launch of a shared online poker liquidity network, which will see France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal merge their player pools in a bid to give a much-needed boost to their online poker markets.
Both Kanit and Mateos are well-known names in the world of live and online poker. With live tournament earnings of more than $9.6 million, Mateos is Spain’s second most profitable player of all-time. Over the course of his poker career, the player has won three WSOP gold bracelets, including one for taking down the 2013 WSOP Europe Main Event.
In the spring of 2015, the young Spaniard captured another major title. He topped the field of the European Poker Tour Monte Carlo Grand Final for a first-place prize of €1,082,000 and the multiple accolades that go along with such a prestigious title.
As for Kanit, the Italian has more than $9.2 million in live tournament winnings and over 242 online in-the-money results. The player is his homeland’s most profitable poker pro. Kanit has not won gold bracelets yet, but has been particularly active on the WSOP stage over the past several years, accruing over $615,324 from series events. Kanit has also been extremely proficient in high roller events over the course of his career. The player has topped the field of multiple such events, mostly once to have taken place within EPT festivals.
Mateos and Kanit are joining a cluster of poker pros, including Davidi Kitai, Sylvain Loosli, and Romain Lewis among others, to promote the Winamax brand across Europe.
Winamax and the Shared Liquidity Scheme
The regulator of Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal signed a shared online poker liquidity agreement in July after a year of negotiations on the terms of the future launch of an online poker network. It was in early 2017 when Winamax, which is currently licensed in France only, first signaled its intention to expand into other regulated jurisdictions and to participate in the shared liquidity project. The operator posted on its LinkedIn page back in January an announcement that it was looking for Spanish-, Italian-, and Portuguese-speaking staff.
Italy is expected to launch a call for bids from operators interested to enter the country’s market anytime now. Spain has also recently announced that it would move to expand its market by opening another bidding round for brands that would like to obtain a Spanish iGaming license.
As for Portugal, it opened its market for regulated operations last year and has been granting licenses since then. At present, PokerStars is the only online poker operator to have obtained a license from Portuguese regulators, but it is believed that once the shared online poker liquidity network is launched, this would change and more poker brands will be admitted to the market.
