It's very serious! You can read the whole draft bill here yourseelf:

http://www.ejpd.admin.ch/content/dam.../vorentw-d.pdf

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I don't think anything will happen very soon, our regulating agencies are always very slow with regards to stuff like this... You are a bit behind in time by the way, Anton Allemann and Ronny Kaiser used to crush highstakes games live and online a few years ago, but they are both not very active anymore.

Allemann has founded an investment company and is busy managing his hedge fund or something like that nowadays and probably doesn't even give a shyt about online poker anymore, so I don't know what you want to hear "what he thinks about this"

Yeah I heard on one of our national radio stations that it could take quite some time (they even went as far as 2018 - doubt it though) but if nothing changes
in the current draft bill we'll eventually face the hard reality of a ****ty swiss only site.
And tbh I wouldn't be surprised if the law will come into effect way earlier than expected (like late 2014/early 2015) since local casionos made less and less profit the past years and they are obv they driving force behind all this.


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Its one of those things that will take a ton of time, and its due to the lack of knowledge for the people in charge of it alll, clueless.

And that means? We should just sit on our hands and give ourself up to sinister fate?

Maybe you are right about our government being slow, but this seems like a very big problem for us swiss players, so we should do evrything we can to influence as much as possible.

By the way, you are wrong, I met Anton Allemann 2 years ago or so in the Casino Baden and spoke to him shortly. He may focus on his investment company nowadays, but I'm very sure he DOES give a **** about the poker situation in switzerland. he was a pioneer in switzerland and the first internationally succesful highroller and a representative for pokerstars for some time. I don't know if he is still active in online poker, but he still plays live games and people talk about him playing in big private cashgames with business guys, etc, so he definitely still plays poker.

Ronny also still plays, he was just playing big games at EPT Vienna.

If we want to influence the regulation, we should unite all players and if we have a guy like Allemann on our side it could be much more helpful than some online players who do nothing

I had a short talk with a politican about the situation.

The law wont be valid before 2016 (2016 earliest point). And usually the bill will change till it's proven.



So, we have to wait...

I dont believe that the swiss goverment has the opportunity to block foreign servers

That's not really hard for them. The website is just blocked and you get a warning that the website in question is unable to download or sth like that.

I just come back from the US and I can garanty you that you don't have any way to play on ps for entrence.

By the way here is the text in french for the no-german speakers : http://www.admin.ch/ch/f/gg/pc/docum...jeuxargent.pdf

I'm not that surprised about this decision, I mean, in almost every country of EU it is already the case. It should happen, but I didn't know before I read this topic.

So, this law give the opportunity to people to exploit the pokersites no?

Just a question. Can you access Full tilt's website ? (I mean fulltilt.com or fulltiltpoker.com not the sofware). I can't access it since a few days. I post it here because maybe it's a regional issue. The support seems not to know why it doesn't work.

^ I can, from my phone and work pc. All good

Ok thanks for the answer. Good to know that it's only me! ;-)

i just realised that it would be pretty much impossible to be even just a "reg" on a swiss-only-pokersite...

poker just isnt popular enough in switzerland to build a big playerpool and therefore almost no volume possible for mtters specially.. so i guess it would almost feel like black friday in the states for us... move to another country or play 15games/session..

thats just can't happen..

any updates?

Any updates?

Consultation is open until August 20. This is early in a long process.

Enangelizers gonna Evangelize ! Love your passion. Never give up.

funny post and agreeably relavent here.

Still never gonna happen

But who knows, alot of very smart folks used to think the world was flat and they were very very wrong.

maybe most others just think the world is flat, and you know that its not.

Yours is so much more relevant....but unfortunately not funny and overall poorly written.

A Swiss politician (memeber of the Swiss parliament), whose name I won't mention here since I'm not sure if he would be cool with it, told me via email that he is in touch with PokerStars but they don't seem to be extremely interested in fighting for keeping the Swiss market, but according to him they will likely participate in the respective legislative process by consultation.

im actually looking forward to live in mexico :P

Even so; there is not really a lobby against the law? The sole poker business is too small in order for big companies (Pokerstars etc.) to fight over the market. The local casinos are losing real life traffic, due to the high online traffic; they are interested in pushing the new law.

Best possible outcome; they will push the new law and then never ever look ingo it again...like they do with littering or the other 99% of our laws.

Is anyone actualy going to do a response to the consultation as a Swiss poker player?

The basic points should be simple - the need to have access to an international player pool in order to have access to a range of games and tournaments at different times, plus access to large field MTTs.

Essentially better consumer provision by allowing access to international sites.

Good points but I don't think that would be enough to change the legislative text in a desirable way.

Local casionos are pushing the agenda because they lose more and more players to online sites but that's ofc not one of their arguments for the new law.
The main arguments for the new gambling law are mainly protection of the Swiss players from shady foreign unregulated sites and the new Swiss online sites should have effective precautionary measures in place for gambling addicts.
Swiss politicians and the Swiss generally couldn't care less if a professional poker player is still able to play professionally or not since they generally don't consider it as true work. They just want as less gambling addicts as possible.

A viable argument could be that a country that boasts its direct democracy all the time shouldn't just take away the right to play with an international player pool which would cleary not be in the interest of most of the players.
Or that it's quite a big task to put up such a secure quality site like PokerStars is one (security in the sense of colluding and bot protection is prolly not even in their minds when they speak about secure sites....) and it would be prolly way easier to license a such a foreign site and force them to implement effective precautionary measures for gambling addicts (at least for the Swiss player pool) instead of trying to build such a site from scratch.

Edit: As I've wrote above PokerStars is likey gonna respond to the consultation.

Public consultations are responded to by very few people. This is a huge shame as they have to consider all the inputs to the consultation and to some extent justify what they are doing in response to those responses.

Typically (OK this is UK experience) the responses are published and they respond to the points made.

Now I am sure that you are right that they may not care what a pro says - but that perspective should be put. My points were about the consumer, the rec player and their choice/freedom which is really a different response. There are TWO here and if nobody tells them then they don't even have to ignore.

One approach might be to point out that the casinos - who will be using this opportunity to push their case BTW - do not deal poker at the typical online stakes. They are asking for a ban on penny stakes they don't deal. A case that it is unreasonable to ban online stakes well below casino levels would be a hard one for the regulator or the casinos to counter.

My bet is that Swiss casinos don't do very low stakes cash or any reasonable stake tournaments so it would be hard for them to claim unfair competition for their business - different game.

Anyway, I'm not Swiss - My point is that any player who is should submit to the consultation and say what they want - the number of responses in total is likely to be in the tens - the voice does get heard, some poor sap is paid to read it and consider it just at the point they are legislating.....an hour or two reading the consult and responding....that price compared to losing international player pools seems cheap to me.

Great post! And you're absolutely right!

I'm gonna respond to it in the next few days and I hope there will be others from this forum who will do the same.

For those who are not aware of it, the consulation is in written form and below you get all the information needed to respond to the consultation (unfortunately only in German, even though admin.ch is actually available in english as well).

I don't speak anything but English so I can't see what they are asking for views on but if we assume that it is the usual mix of consumer protection and vested interests trying to use the law to do a bit of regulatory capture of the market then one thing you would want to make sure you include is how to get that improved consumer protection without losing international player pools.

The new UK licencing model is the only show in town for that. Using that model the Swiss could recognise UK licence holders as basically OK in terms of consumer protection and either passport that icencing in for poker in Switzerland or introduce a scheme for poker that OK'd sites with a UK licence so long as they took a Swiss licence with any of the additional rules they want - that might be a tax contribution based on Swiss players or it might be cutting out very high stakes that they want to lock in for the casino lobby.

If you want to include soething on the UK system that lets us have international player pools DM me the question(s) in the consultation that it might be relevant for and I can probably help out with some boilerplate text for you to make your own.

In general with consultations you want to keep banging on about your main theme (international player pools) whilst explaining how everyone else's concerns can be addressed within that - ie player fund protection, money laundering, detection of crime, games operated by trustworthy people, testing that the software is fair, keeping the under age out, provision for problem gamblers......