The new law about online gaming took place a few days ago in France, first for sport bets and now for poker. Pokerstars has no choice but to forbid access to all french players on the .com since 10pm CET today. Now we've got a popup saying we can't play real money games on stars due to government regulations in France.

I don't like the way this is going....I want tournys to get bigger and bigger as stars grows....not smaller :/


I'm thinking like 15 mil GTD Sundays millions in the future...my dreams are crushed

The French are amonst the most spewtarded of all Europeans on Stars. This is extremely bad news imo.

Are there any French sites that are offered? I would like to give those a try.

pretty bad news

sorry to those in France


cliff notes on the new law?

illegal for french to play on sites without french licenses afaik

stars can't get licensed?

stars could get licensed, but i believe there are no international player pools allowed in france.

So it might be a similar model to Italy, where they have pokerstars.com.it

it might be pokerstars.com.fr

WTF. This is ******ed. I'm moving to Mars.

Why didn't Poker Stars just threaten to have the Isle of Man declare war on France if this legislation passed? They could have stopped this cold months ago IMO.

Lol @ the EU countries doing something as isolationist as this

what is very clear imo is this


keeping the ability to play online poker is not just an american fight. it's a world wide struggle, and other countries need to have their own PPA


the PPA needs to expand to the globe imo. our fight is not simply in the US. the more countries that pass laws detrimental to us poker players, the more momentum our opposition will have. the more cases they reference in their decisions to destroy online poker.

this. stars ARE getting licensed, but pokerstars.fr will operate just like pokerstars.it (except with cash games from the off). we will only be allowed to play with other players in france.

yo

I am french and spewtarded. and wtf this sucks a lot.
What is fun is that government calls this 'liberalizing gambling market"-----> you can play, but where we tell you to.
not only do you have to play on french sites, but after your first deposit on the site, you have to send an ID to prove your 18+ and french
"we know who you are, we know where you play. now take the red pill"
mafia is that???

Question :

I have dual-citizenship with Canada (french-canadian but live in France, can i do something about this bs ?

Does this mean Ipoker will lose the French players ?
That is terrible - they are (on average) the worst spewtards in Europe

My fear is that California is next

Or how about the French etc start there own ppa. You think the ppa has enough resources to go global and fight everyone?

For those who don't view NVG, here is the post I made in that thread on this subject:

The single bottom line in all of this, no matter what country, is that few if any politicians understand that Poker, despite its association with "casinos" and "gambling" is vastly different from those casino games and requires a different business model.

Equally troublesome is that many in the general public do not realize the difference either.

And some groups and interests purposely try to blur the distinction.

And the distinction is important. Poker is a game of predominantly skill, and poker is played "peer to peer" and never against the house. This means that while a French only online slots site, or BlackJack site, or craps site is not a big deal for those players, a French only online poker site will ultimately fail to provide what most French players want in terms of availability of competition. Competition between sites and competition in the available player pool will be severely restricted under this law.

Exactly how such a reduction in available competition will change the game is open to speculation, but it seems to me that in no way can this be good for French folks who enjoy playing at all hours and days, nor any French online professionals and would-be professionals.

In the USA we have had success fighting back against this by organizing politically. In really just 3 years of work we have absolutely stopped things from getting worse and we are hopeful of actually making things better.

I am quite surprised at the number of countries where poker is popular but threatened but where there is no equivalent of a PPA.

YOU CANNOT TRUST YOUR POLITICIANS TO UNDERSTAND POKER. IF NOT CONTACTED AND EDUCATED THEY DO NOT KNOW THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ONLINE POKER AND VIDEO POKER. ITS TRUE. And so you get laws like this one.

And for my fellow US posters, its not good to get too boastful here. Many of the individual state online poker laws proposed recently (in CA and FL, for example) are very similar to this French law.

Skallagrim

I am currently living in France and this is typical of the French. First their draconian 3 strike downloading law and now this.

As a lover of the game and to all isolated French players, what are we to do?

I have read mixed reports about IP masking programs such as Hotspot Shield.....

Does anyone have any experience of using such a device??? What was your experience, does it work??

Also, I see UB are still taking French players. is this set to change in the near future??

Yes. I've seen lots of posts saying "Who cares? I don't live in the U.S." and that sort of thing when it comes to banning poker, but this is a bad trend wherever it's happening.

I don't live in France, but this still pisses me off. It's not right and it's a very bad sign for what could happen in other countries going forward.

French law allows players from other countries to play on .FR sites (more tax for the French government), after going through some hoops. It doesn't allow French players to play on .COM international sites (less tax for the French government).

here goes full tilt too ffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

And Partypoker.com, I just received the email.

IMO, eventually most countries will have laws like this one. Then, the most successful online poker sites will be those that manage to ignore or violate these laws.