France trails Italy across poker and sports
Comparative figures published by ARJEL shows GGR from dot.it market more than 7% higher than dot.fr total excluding FDJ.
Italy’s egaming market is generating more than 7% more revenue than France, according to new figures published by French regulator ARJEL which provide a comparison of the dot.fr and dot.it markets.
The Italian total comes in at 749m, while for France [excluding unavailable data from former monopoly La Française des Jeux (FDJ)] the total is 698m.
Italy leads the way for GGR across cash poker (209m to ARJEL’s 188m), tournament poker (151m to 109m), and sports betting (167.8m to 138m), however France makes up for this discrepancy with its 263m GGR in horse betting for the year ended December 2012.
The 149m contributed by dot.it casino, a figure boosted in December by the advent of online slots, helped the Italian market record a 2% year-on-year increase for the full year, while France’s 4% year-on-year improvement came largely due to double-digit growth in sports betting and poker tournaments despite a 13% decline from cash poker as several operators fled the market.
Last month saw ARJEL president Jean-François Vilotte make the case for pooled poker liquidity across European dot.country markets, in the light of tentative discussions to that end last year.
He said: “ARJEL advocates the opening of the offer of legal new variants of poker and pooling cash poker tables to allow French players to play with foreign players if they play on sites regulated by European authorities with which agreements have been previously passed by ARJEL and implementing regulatory standards at least equivalent.”
Meanwhile France could be set for a poker boost with the news that PokerStars, second in market share behind Winamax, has been cleared to offer its fast-paced ‘Zoom’ product to the French market.