France, Spain and Portugal have opened up their doors to shared poker liquidity in their player pools and Italy is expected to follow soon.
The first online poker room to take advantage of this shared liquidity agreement was PokerStars – the biggest online poker website in the world. PokerStars can expect competition very soon as partypoker, which is owned by GVC Holdings has just revealed its plans to enter all four markets and take advantage of the shared player pool themselves.
This announcement comes via a recent post on the Two Plus Two forum.
A partypoker representative responded to a query about partypoker's plans about shared liquidity. In the post, the representative responded positively about French and Spanish player sharing, while also mentioning Portugal and Italy.
partypoker has been on a roll during the last couple of years as the online poker operator has made an effort to revamp its brand and marketing strategy and the move has paid off very well. Similar to PokerStars, partypoker has a solid presence in France and Spain while in Italy it has a presence due to a local network of bwins and Gioco Digitale skins. However partypoker's main website partypoker.it has been shut down since 2016. When it comes to Portugal, partypoker is yet to launch operations as it does not have an online poker license.
Details of planned partypoker rollout
The online poker operator will need to get approval from Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos (SRIJ), the gambling regulator in Portugal and then look at servicing the Portuguese market. Integrating players from all four countries will require quite a bit of work for the online poker operator and as a result, launching online poker shared liquidity operations in all four countries will take a bit of time.
The most likely move for partypoker will be for it to first launch shared liquidity operations in Spain and France. The online poker operator will need to make changes to its online poker software before it can proceed with this move. French operator Winamax is expected to launch online shared liquidity services next and will most likely be the first competitor to challenge PokerStars in the shared liquidity markets. partypoker does not want to waste more time and lose market share to its competitors. The online poker operator expects things to move swiftly and is optimistic that it will launch shared liquidity operations in the coming months.
