It’s kind of hard to imagine that the free-thinking Dutch would ban something that could be potential harmful, but at the moment online poker does fall into the illegal category, something that may change after the government sponsored Online Gaming Advisory Committee findings.

First off, the committee states how ineffectual the current laws and restrictions are concerning online poker. The reasons the committee found in favor of legalizing online poker were: Holland currently has state sponsored lotteries and sports-betting, and the only way to stop the current ‘illegal’ online poker operations is to have ISP providers block the sites –doing so would violate current EU laws regarding fair trade –not to mention that blocking ISP’s is always a very tricky situation and difficult to enforce.

Should the Holland government take the committee’s advice it would not be all roses and sunshine for Dutch poker players; the committee suggested enacting similar online poker laws to what France has recently implemented. Basically, online poker rooms would have to be licensed in Holland, and could only provide their services to Dutch residents.

The French laws have been widely denounced by online poker player: Not only have they seen their overall player pool dramatically decreased, but they have also been subject to increased rakes by the sites in order to cover the licensing fees and taxation that are now in place.

Tags: Holland Poker, Legalizing online poker, Online Gaming Advisory Committee, Online Poker, Poker in Holland

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.