Europe is legalizing Online Poker
It is not the whole Europe but the most important country which is a major player of online poker, France approves bill to make online poker legal. The bill which was approved not only approved online poker but all the gambling games were legalized. Although there were some restrictions in the bill like the company which wants to get the online gambling license must first close its business for at least 6 months and then they can apply for the license.
There was another very interesting restriction in the bill that only those gambling operators can have their license that do not have any subsidiaries or operations in tax havens. This is going to be a big restriction for online gambling site holders and many of them will not be able to apply for the license. The big sites like partypoker.com will also not be able to get their French online poker license but it won’t be a big problem for them because these websites are already getting good business from other big poker countries.
There are not going to be many websites which are going to get their online gambling license. The budget minister, Eric Woerth said that there are going to be around 50 websites in France which will receive their online poker license. This is a very small number of websites as compared to the online players in France however, some of the players have to go to the casinos and bars instead of playing online poker. The new bill which was passed also said that there will be only 2% tax on these online poker sites which is almost negligible for these kinds of websites but that 2% is really going to give the France Government a huge income.
The bill was a source of good news for very few people as not all the gambling sites are going to enjoy the benefit of having the license. Either these websites have to close down their servers and start some other business or they have to get the license of some other country and start their business in that country. Discussions are still going and it is said that the France government might increase the number of websites which are going to have the license because of the increasing number of France online poker players.
