Live Poker? Not Yet...

Live poker tournaments have been recently very successful in Italy.  Italians love playing poker, but most of them cannot afford to reach every week-end one of the 4 casinos that are currently open in Italy. Consequently, poker clubs have been arranging a number of very popular poker tournaments. However, life has never been easy for poker clubs! Local police authorities were in charge of setting the rules governing such tournaments which gave rise to considerable inconsistencies between municipalities. To limit such inconsistencies, the Italian Parliament has empowered the Ministry of Home Affairs to issue the regulations governing the performance of live poker tournaments nationwide, and has also set forth the basic principles with which the Ministry shall abide in drafting the regulations. The operators entitled to run live tournaments will only be:

• the companies holding an offline gaming license as well as
• the companies meeting the requirements necessary to hold an online gaming license (which will be identified through a call for tenders),

following an authorization from the Italian gaming authority.

The abovementioned regulations have not been issued yet and the Ministry of Home Affairs has now decided to prohibit the performance of any live poker tournament until the new regulations will be in place. Needless to say that this measure has led to considerable complaints by operators that were looking forward to acquiring the licenses necessary to run live poker tournaments and now have to put all their short term plans on hold. Looking at the next developments will be very interesting especially because the launch of videolotteries in this  period might represent a good opportunity for gaming operators interested in setting up gaming halls offering videolotteries and poker tournaments.