Italian sportsbetting gets bigger

Ladbrokes have announced an expansion of their Italian sportsbetting website, they are adding online poker later this month and bingo and more casino games in the near future

Texas Hold’em enthusiasts in Italy are soon going to be able to play at a new website thanks to Ladbrokes. The Ladbrokes team have recently announced that they are adding Poker to its sportsbetting website in the very near future.

Ladbrokes, a well known and established British operator have received their license from the regulator Amministrazione Autoname Dei Monopoli Di Stato and have aspirations of launching their dedicated Italian Poker service later this month.
According to Ladbrokes, the service will only be available to Italian players in accordance with local regulations. These regulations also stipulate that all competitions must be tournaments and cannot be cash games. Therefore the service will be launched with a series of Texas Hold’em tournaments.

A statement recently released by Ladbrokes says that, “The regulated Italian gambling market is expected to be the biggest in Europe this year with online regulated poker expected to generate €2.2 billion in turnover. According to H2 Capital, regulated poker in Italy will generate €280 million in gross revenues for operators in 2009. With regulations set to allow cash games and casino gaming, the onshore regulated market is expected to generate gross revenues of approximately €630 million during 2010 rising to nearly €800 million by 2012.”

The Italian sportsbetting service Ladbrokes.it was launched by Ladbrokes in 2008 and to date has in excess of thirty five thousand registered customers. In order to They have recently closed their retails service in Italy in order to focus more on the sportsbetting website and have also revealed that they wish to expand to include casino and bingo in the next few months.

Christopher Bell, the Chief Executive Officer for Ladbrokes shed some more light on the future plans for expansion and which areas of the online gaming market will be encompassed….. “We are committed to expanding the international reach of our online business and Italy is an excellent regulated market opportunity. We hope that further positive changes in regulations in Italy will allow us to further expand our product range by launching cash games in poker as well as bingo and casino gaming later this year.”