EU Follows UK Lead for Online Poker

If the internet is the Wild West of the new information age, then online poker sites are it’s saloons. Especially if you choose your table skin on Party right. You can’t sling a gun at the table, but you can meet with fellow travelers who come from far and wide – and take their money in a game of chance and skill.

At least that is what it was like back in noughties when everyone was still looking out for the sharp object that was going to burst the online poker bubble. In the EU the big blow came in 2010 with ARJEL, the French online gambling regulator, closing down the ability of French players to access international poker rooms by threatening their ISPs with fines.

Italy, Spain and Portugal followed suit, creating a situation where pockets of players can only play with other people with the same sort of passport. The result online poker is in a decline across Europe.

Perfidious Albion, however, has always taken a more international approach to gambling, ever since the Million Lottery of 1694 was used to pay for an overseas war. You can still log on to PokerStars.uk and play with people the world over. So, where you might find 600ish players online on a Portuguese site, the UK sites have access to easily ten times that number of players.

ARJEL have noted this and recently formalized a ‘player liquidity sharing arrangement’. This arrangement, modeled on the UK’s legislation, would allow member countries players to share player pools just as UK. This would lay the groundwork for further international cooperation and competition in the long run, and in the short run will hopefully draw more people to the game. No more failing to find a table’s worth of players at your stakes and giving up, logging off and taking to the patisserie for a consoling macaron.

At the moment there is no confirmation of which nations will be signing up to the agreement, or in fact which countries will be allowed to. Nor what that will mean for the player sharing situation across the globe in place that already do this sort of thing.

Whatever happens, it might be time to brush up on your Omaha game. The Europeans are coming back.