Great signings by winamax - Adrian Mateos from Spain and Mustapha Kanit from Italy - both play all the high rollers around the world so pretty good exposure for them. Their marketing is well executed.

I guess both winamax and pokerstars will launch right from the beginning, when the pools merge, right?

Winamax is the leader in France, they do everything better than amaya. They will take down amaya on the .eu then on the .com, let's Hope!!!

Best sofware, best innovation, best marketing, best promotion, better support, they love (or least like poker) and they want to do good things. They managed to build this company despite the stupid french regulation.

From the Frech perspective it might be good, but from my perspective it has the most torture slow micro games and too high rake to play plo and build limit games. So, I am not playig there (although could play tourneys). If the rake gets any lower with the larger Mediterranean pool remains to be seen, and if still open to many EU players. But the Mediterranean rake is high on average, so likely a skip.

The only other palce that had that slow games were some limits at Microgaming nlh, full of multitabling grinders.

Yeah rake is high but It is worth it if you play 1-2 or higher. And the reason of this rake is not that winamax is a greedy mother****er but the french governement tax it like crazy and do not accept the "no flop, no rake"

I hope the .eu will still be open to other europeans

First license for the shared pool issued in France.

Source!

"ARJEL said the operator must ensure that its brand only shares liquidity within the borders of the jurisdictions that participate in the project."


Does this mean no eu players?

PLO is basically unbeatable at low stakes on Winamax.fr. I tried to build up from .10/.25 and .25/.50, but even the best players in the game were breaking even (I know this because they ran some promos showing the biggest winners for each week and it was never much). Hopefully the new regulations will remedy this, but I doubt it.

" On July 6 in Rome, the President of the ARJEL, Charles COPPOLANI, signed with his
Spanish, Italian and Portuguese counterparts a poker cash sharing agreement
online (1).
Six months later, Spain and France are able to announce that poker tables
Franco-Spanish will be offered to players from both countries in the next few weeks. " - press release from Arjel

Does anybody have more details about this? This means that in a few weeks it will be possible to play from there?

Yes, it follows Spain moving forward with their updated regulations that should be published in the state gazette this month. At that point, both Spain and France will be ready to authorize licensed operators to offer cross-border shared liquidity (PokerStars already is, in France).

So hopefully, by end of January PokerStars will combine the player pools of France and Spain.

Is there any news about german player's perspective of staying in the main pool or joining the euro pool?

No.
I would expect a change soon.

If they can share player pools like this, why only with specific countries? Why can't they just share with the main worldwide sites? It seems silly because the game would grow faster and so the sites and governments would make more money. It would be awesome if it could become a worldwide player pool again, imagine how big the tournaments would be! Maybe cryptocurrency will make it possible one day even if governments won't.

Germany won't "join the Euro pool" in the way Italy/Spain/France/Portugal have. Germany is unregulated and serviced by companies licensed abroad. If you're currently a German playing on a dot-com/dot-EU site in the international player pool (e.g. pokerstars.eu), you'll stay playing in that pool.

The only open question is whether Winamax, under its French (or, in the future, Spanish or Italian) license will continue to serve Germany, as they do now. Some are interpreting the new French shared liquidity regs and saying that is not permitted; that's not my interpretation, but we will see. As it stands now Winamax have not been issued a French shared liquidity license and does not have a license yet in Spain (tho is likely to have applied). We'll have to wait and see.

Hmm, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Softest network of all time? Or softest network there will ever be in all time?

This is already happening! As you said, cryptocurrency is giving people a new territory of freedom.

For example, America's Card Room (accepts players from all over the world, preferred deposit method is cryptocurrency) is having a bigger tournament (1 million and 1 dollar GTD) than pokerstars (Just 1 million GTD) starting this Sunday, the "biggest online regular guaranteed tournament".

It will be happening every week starting 1/7/2018. Keep an eye on that, it is already GTD ($1,000,001) and it may become even bigger as the site is growing fast.

At launch definitely I'd say. But then the regulars that had to move out from those countries may find it attractive enough to return to their home lands which would even the things more.

Still the information out there points to a slower start than expected with France and Spain only. In Italy there are pressures to abandon the agreement and in Portugal you don't even heard a word about anything. Lobbies... they say!

with just France and Spain, would there be any trafic at mid-high stakes SNG's?

I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

There is currently ZERO traffic in Spain regarding SNG and cash, MTT is small but its ok for lowstakes and in the weekends mostly sundays mid stake MTT is OK.
Im curious which client will go first, Pokerstars, Winamax, 888, ipoker are all offering games atm in Spain, but im not sure they are all allowed to offer games in France.
But its exciting that finally things are moving into the right direction.

If anybody here knows more about the clients that will offer the combined player pool first let me know, because right now Winamax is not available in Spain for example.

well, for the moment only Pokerstars recived official aproval from ARJEL :
http://www.arjel.fr/IMG/pdf/2017-026.pdf

i wanted to relocate just to play mid-high stakes sit and goes. So i guess i wont have any traffic .

What if Italy and Portugal also join, would there be any chance ?

Duno my friend.
All I know is that on french and spanish sites, traffic above 10 € is nearly non existend. My believe is, that for Italy and Portugal it's the same. But if you play Spin & Go's you'll find traffic above 10 €.
So you better wait and find out for yourself before relocating.

Someone on Winamax lobby said Spanish players are able to play on Winamax now? Any truth to this?

No, but probably this weak pokerstars launch new lobby with both. And wina appear in spain in next months.