Poker fans who want to play against each other and reside in Spain or France were given access to PartyPoker on June 4. It all started with ARJEL, a French regulator for gaming, which announced a year ago that there would be a new agreement signed by Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France. This agreement is mainly focused on online poker pools sharing. Before the agreement, a rule of closed liquidity poker markets was active. In plain English, this meant that people from, say France, were able to play Poker online only against the people from the same country, but not against residents of other countries.
The original date of agreement signing was on July 6, 2017, but France and Spain were slow to react to it. Finally, they agreed to sign the agreement on January 2018 and immediately started building towards accomplishing the goals in the agreement. Portugal and Italy are taking a slower pace because there are a lot of papers to be signed, a lot of bureaucracy, and a lot of staff to be appointed. When it comes to PartyPoker, it was present in France and Spain long before the agreement, but only now can the residents of these two countries feel its true powers and potential. Not only can they compete with one another but also participate in weekly tournaments that have more than €1 million worth.
The French can also enjoy a schedule of tournaments that are multi-table and that are twice as large than before they are allowed liquidity. Apart from the one million euros weekly guarantee, the buy-ins for these tournaments are pretty low, and they range anywhere from €0.55 to €250. Also, the famous tournaments called Progressive Knockouts (PKO) will now have more than €600,000 in guarantees, and the site will continue with their policy that they will not charge rake on the bounty element in these PKO tournaments.
Another interesting feature that the players from the two countries will experience is the short-handed tournaments which come with interesting names such as Bazooka, Predator, Shield, and Monster.
Players who enjoyed playing PartyPoker from Spain before the agreement had only cash games such as an option to play and the multi-table will now become one of the available options as well.
Tom Waters, a Managing Director at PartyPoker said that PartyPoker.eu site launching was a milestone for the French and the Spanish players since they could enjoy lower rakes, and greater choice of games. He also stated that PartyPoker was looking forward to joining the players from France and Spain in the new and improved website which would give them lots of fun.
EU PartyPoker ambassador, Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier stated that he was enthusiastic about the changes and that their goal was to provide a great experience in all areas of the world. Furthermore, ElkY announced that the EU version of the website is still not done with the surprises and that there would be more good news for the players very soon.