More licenses to come!

A list of 17 legal sports betting and poker websites was published in France this month and another list is expected soon

Early this month, on Tuesday June 8th, a list was published of websites where it is legal to play poker in France. The list was published by the Regulatory Authority of Online Gambling (ARJEL) and they are already said to be working on a second list. So far a total of 17 licenses for sports betting and poker websites have been unveiled. A number more website operators have also applied for licenses and are waiting impatiently for the outcome of their applications. So far a total of thirty five license applications are believed to have been received, however, due to the strict criteria which operators must stick to and the amount of time it takes to analyse their records, so far it has not been possible to process all these applications.

So far the list of legal operators allowed to offer horse betting includes Betclic.fr, Beturf.fr and PMU and have been in operation for a few weeks. There are also a number of websites who are licensed to offer sports betting, these include Unibet, Bwin, ParionsWeb (La Française des Jeux), France-Pari, Chilipari, PMU, and Sajoo Europsortbet. According to the decision made by ARJEL they are allowed to offer betting on fifteen sports which can include athletics, motor racing, rowing, basketball, cycling, horse riding, golf, handball, judo, motorcycling, rugby, tennis, table tennis, volleyball and football. There are also a number of online poker operators which have received approval, however, players will be waiting until this summer when new technical documents are published which deal with the issues of unsubscribing and re-registration to websites. People are looking forward to the publication of the second list as this is expected to greatly widen the choice available online for players in France.