As we spoke of several times recently, four countries in Europe have signed a shared-liquidity agreement relating to online poker play. Both France and Spain have made significant steps towards getting this network off the ground, with Portugal preparing itself to enter into the network soon.
However, one of the largest poker rooms in the world, Winamax, which bases itself out of France, is the second licensee of the country to receive approval that allows it to begin cross-border online poker liquidity sharing on the network. It was on Thursday last week that the regulatory body of France, ARJEL made the official notice of the approval. This gives Winamax the permission to share poker liquidity with the aforementioned Spain, Portugal and remaining signee of the agreement, Italy.
This approval follows up on the French version of the PokerStars platform receiving the same permission. This saw it unite with the Spanish version of the PokerStars site, with the two sharing poker liquidity between them. Speaking of Winamax though, this poker platform has yet to acquire a licence from the gambling regulator of Spain. However, it’s quite clear that it has the intention to acquire such, as Spanish poker player Adrian Mateos became the brand ambassador last October.
The Remaining Countries in the Deal
Harking back to what we reported last week, the regulatory body of Portugal finally approved the regulations relating to liquidity-sharing. However, PokerStars is actually the only poker licensee within Portugal for the time being. It is expected that players of this brand will be able to access the prize pool of the network soon though.
As far as Italy goes, the country has not yet confirmed when it will be able to join the poker network. Despite the fact that Italian politicians have noted that they will respect the signed agreement, no official dates or times have been given as to when the country’s involvement will start. Winamax did manage to secure itself an Italian concession in October of 2017 from the subsidiary of Betclic Everest Group known as Bet-At-Home. It was only in 2015 that Winamax actually came out of Italy’s regulated market because of the company being unsatisfied with certain limitations. The shared-liquidity network has managed to spark some sort of new interest in the Italian market for the brand though.
Time will tell on the moves of both Italy and Portugal, but for now, things seem to be progressing in a great way for the shared-liquidity network between the four countries. We expect more news to come forth relating to this as online poker rooms and regulatory bodies work together to secure a network with high liquidity.
