This week the 1st licensed poker rooms in Denmark launched despite scepticism that licensed poker rooms might not be able to launch in January 2012 due to technical issues. Regulated online poker was coming to Denmark in 2012 at some point regardless of technical issues, but many industry experts thought that the 1st Denmark licensed poker rooms wouldn’t launch in January 2012.
In December 2011 the Danish Gambling Authority made an announcement that 38 online gambling operators received a total of 55 licenses to operate regulated online poker rooms, online casinos and online sportsbooks. The top online poker sites in the industry including PokerStars, Party Poker, 888 Poker and PKR Poker all received a license from the Danish Gambling Authority.
The new online gambling regulations came into affect in Denmark on January 1st 2012. However, one of the regulations is that all poker rooms need to implement NemID, which is a system in Denmark to ensure logging into online services is secure. It quickly became apparent that poker rooms weren’t going to be able to implement the NemID system in time for the New Year.
During the holidays the Danish Tax Authority (SKAT) stated that licensed operators in Denmark would still be able to launch this month without the NemID system implemented. Every licensee has been given until March 1st 2012 to add NemID. If NemID isn’t implement by March 1st the poker sites that haven’t implemented the system will need to cease operations until they do.
How Will Poker Rooms Survive in Denmark?
One question many people are wondering is how online poker operators will survive in the Denmark market. Poker operators are going to need to pay a 20% tax on gross earnings, which leaves little profit margins for network skins. The fact that there will be so many poker rooms licensed in Denmark means that the competition is going to be incredibly tough as well.
Bwin.Party & Danske Spil Launch Regulated Online Poker Room
A few days ago Bwin.Party made an announcement that they just launched a poker room in Denmark with Danske Spil. For those of you that don’t know, Danske Spil is the national lottery operator in Denmark. The brand new poker room should be able to grab a large percentage of the online poker market in Denmark due to the fact it’s operated by Danske Licens Spil.
Danske Licens Spil already operates online gambling and has 600,000 registered Danish gamblers. This will definitely help the new poker room launch with a bang and it will help bwin.party gain a piece of the Danish market. Both parties have made statements about the new partnership and both companies expressed their excitement to work together.
Bwin.Party has been forming several great partnerships in regulated or soon to be regulated online poker markets. Once the new regulated markets have time to mature I think we’ll find that Bwin.Party has done a great job forming partnerships with companies that have local experience.
