a good question would be: will the 4 countries pay the same rake or there will be different poker clients for each country considering its most likely not the same.

right, apart from the obvious question of when will this be a reality, the rake and taxes question now will get in place.

will all players and operators pay same rake/taxes no matter what country they are?

will be different taxes and rake models depending on what country you are?

both scenarios can bring up a lot of issues to be settled...

Certainly the gaming revenue situation will not be changed by the time this comes into effect. But personally, I don't see why this will be a reason why operators cannot share full liquidity. It just comes down to attribution.

The French system is 2% of the pot. The Italian is 25% of the rake. The site just needs to track who should be attributed to both the dollars in the pot and the rake contributed by each player, then pay gaming revenue on this. This is already done in lots of jurisdictions (Denmark and UK playing on the dot-com pool). Things are a bit messy but I don't see it as a deal breaker.

I don't think Winamax is staffing up to expand into Italy, Spain and Portugal just to share MTTs.

To answer some questions directly:

So there are two seperate issues obviously, gaming duty that sites pay, and personal income tax on winnings. Personal income tax is not being changed with this deal so we can leave that to one side for now.

Regarding gaming duty, operators will declare their gaming revenue to each jurisdiction they hold a license. They will need to operate under license in each of these European countries, pay gaming duty as normal - the only change is liquidity between jursidictions can be shared. They attribute the size of pots (in France) or the total rake collected (in the other countries) based on which players contributed to the pot, and from what country they are in. Systems like this are already in place in regulated dot-com sites (UK, DK, BE, etc)

For operators, taxes differ yes. In terms of rake models, I don't see how you can have multiple rake models on the same table.* They will need to set a rake that I guess is a middle ground between the sites that covers their costs (in France, in particular, which charges agnostic of rake).

Nothing that hasn't been handled before, though.

* So a few years ago PokerStars put out a press release or blog post that said they were working on a solution that would allow them to do exactly this - to charge different rake depending on the location of the player. Can't find a link to the blog post or story about it, but I know I wrote about it at the time. I personally can't visualize how that would work. Seems simpler to me to use rewards to "rebalance" the differences in gaming duty in different jurisdictions.

thanks for all the info Hood

I've also read the article you linked and it pained me to see the predictions for it to be launched between end of this year and mid-2018, kind of wished it was wrong and we could play sooner than that

the .PT field is such a ghost town

@Hood do you think they are more likely banning other eu players? Well wina must be the only one atm letting us play.

TLDR - don't know. That's the biggest unknown to me. Right now there's no parity between jurisdictions.

- France, anyone with an EU bank account can play on French licensed site. Winamax takes advantage of this, PokerStars did but recently stopped the practice, in preparation of shared liquidity.

- Spain, actually even more liberal than France - operators can accept anyone in the world onto their Spanish licensed site. But no operator chooses to do this, to my knowledge (partypoker and 888 did in the early days, iirc)

- Italy, is shut off to Italian citizens only.

- Portugal, i think the same as Italy.

So on the face of it, I guess Winamax could continue to allow everyone on their French licensed site unless something in this week's agreement changes the status quo. But that means for Winamax, all their international players will be under FR, the highest tax environment. It would be better to launch under license in Spain, and then move all international players onto that license, with a saner tax model...

So, yeah I don't really know how this will shake out.

Appreciate your answer thx.

Cannot see that happening without a change in legislation. A French licenced site pays the tax on the pot, the French tax authorities dgaf who is sitting at the table. Similarly the other countries sites are licensed in that jurisdiction and pay duty on the rake. Although obviously they might be able to get round the issue by simply attributing rake to the "country" of the pot winner, but I imagine sites would want clarification that this is acceptable. France just doesn't fit in.

Hi at all,
this is the best poker forum in the world.
I play poker on partypoker.it (Italy)
Do you think Partypoker may be the biggest competitor of pokerstars, after this shared liquidity market?
Thanks

That's how it works in half a dozen jurisdictions around the world already. When this stuff was hashed out in Belgium, Estonia, the UK, Bulgaria, Denmark - the operators basically told them how they attribute rake (weighted contributed, fwiw).
The "clarification" is exactly what's going to be hammered out over the next six months. But, as say, I'm not seeing the dealbreaker. This has all been done before. It just happened in Finland and Austria, for example. And before that, Nevada and Delaware.

You say the French authorities might not "gaf" about who is sitting at the table, but ultimately only a proportion of that pot fell under the jurisdiction of France. I can't see why they would have spearheaded this effort over the last 18 months and actually pushed through legislative change as they did 12 months ago without this being a consideration.

I think if Winamax receives an Italian license, they will be the biggest competitor and a huge shakeup to the Italian online poker market. I'm interested to see what Peoples Poker does.

release an even ****tier software? Their software is what killed ENET network.

Winamax has 4max just like people's, people's is done.

Hopefully winamax bans outsiders and it will become a super soft site with an amazing software.

I can't see UK joining this anyway. Brexit negotiations are predicted to take a huge turn for the worse shortly as the divorce bill is calculated - said to be 40-100 billion pounds.

It has nothing to do with brexit and UK players aren't ring-fenced in any case.

Agreement signed!

Still, they said the agreement does not go into any details on the taxation. Each country applies their own rules and it's up to the different operators to make sure they abide by the rules. A little bit strange and void. We'll have to wait for more info on this matter.

Thanx for the info Joao.

Do you know if it will it be possible to relocate from another country to one of these countryes and play?

I am pretty sure you can play with residency in Portugal. A friend of mine is american and plays in pokerstars.pt. Probably the same for other countries, but who cares? Portugal is cheaper and has better everything. Only advantage Spain has are the social clubs, the other two don't even count.

Someone asked if UK were joining so I responded. Obviously brexit decreases the chances of such an outcome significantly - fairly basic.

Is this shared liquidity just for CASH games?

"On 6 July, the French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese online gaming regulators signed an agreement on the sharing of online poker cash."

Or will it be a complete software with sng's and mtts?

As far as i understood from Pokerstars suport, they said it will be a full PS client, with all the games available.

Anybody know more about this?

What are you quoting from? If it's a google translation, often it translates it to "poker cash" incorrectly. There's an english version in the appendix or the ARJEL doc. It's for everything. The doc goes into detail on the information sharing for both tournaments and cash games necessary to allow shared liquidity.


I'm with davmcg, the UK not signing has nothing really to do with brexit. TBH I think some sites misreported the fact that the UK was present at some recent of these meetings - in my mind, it was never actually on the cards. Even if the UK did sign, I don't think operators would take advantage of it. They wouldn't want UK players taken out of the primary dot-com pool. I guess they could offer UK players tables on both pools, but I'm not sure if it would be beneficial. Would be good for Winamax but that's about it.

how does it work with winamax? Am i correct in saying they allow players from some eu countries to play on there site, if so which countries are these? same goes for stars fr? Used to play on winamax as uk player, would love to have them back.

Don't know about uk players but you can play winamax if you have eu bank account. You can only withdraw to that account. Stars.fr don't allow any other players than french citizens. Crossing my fingers that they don't kick us out when the merge is happening.

Yes you can play winamx from. Brazil of you have a European bank account.

Yes, of course. Usually they ask for 2 documents:
- proof of residence (any internet or similar monthly service bill under your name) - local bank account.

After that you are good to go.

So when this license goes through, would i, a EU member, be able to move to Italy or Spain to get access to these fields?

Mucho appreciatos.