Home / Poker News February 2011 / Poker industry news – Italy and Macau: emerging poker hotbeds
Poker industry news – Italy and Macau: emerging poker hotbeds
Posted by: James Carter. - Wed, 2011-02-09 10:43
As online poker continues its struggles in the good old US of A, it seems to find prolific breeding grounds elsewhere. Italy is one of the locations which have seen a bona-fide poker explosion over the last year. Italy has long flirted with the idea of legal online poker, but the true explosion came in the wake of Filippo Candio’s
WSOP final table appearance. Candio’s WSOP run has apparently proven to Italians that when it came to poker success, the sky was indeed the limit. December 2010 was a record-breaking month for the Italian poker industry and it helped the entire year become a record-breaking one with €61billion in generated gaming revenue.
Thursday was yet again a big day for Italian poker: cash games were legalized, to give the already thriving industry yet another boost. What this basically means is that licensed operators will now be able to offer their clients cash games and casino games on top of the tournaments they’ve held so far. The 20% tax levied on revenues generated by the above listed activities will make sure that the state budget gets a nice boost out of the initiative as well. The best thing in the new legal environment is that players will be able to reinvest their winnings through satellites without having to cough up tax on them.
Online poker has seen a 30% increase from 2009 to 2010 in Italy.
Another hotbed for poker and online gambling is Macau. Macau isn’t exactly a new presence on the gambling and poker map of the world, but its continuously growing gaming revenues showed another uptick in 2010. 2010 saw a 58% increase over 2009, and 2011 is already shaping up to break even that record.
In other news: the US Online Gaming Association was launched the other day as Sportingbet, PKR and Secured American Games came together to support the legalization of online poker and online gambling in the US.
