Online Poker Revenue in Spain Benefits from Shared Liquidity Pool
The Spanish Regulator, Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego (DGOJ) released the region’s online gambling statistics last week showing improvements with overall revenue growth and with its online poker for the first quarter of this year. The main reason for the growing player pot is the pool Spain shares with other European countries.
Let us remind you that France, Spain, Italy and Portugal agreed in January to team up and share their poker player pools.
France and Spain were the first to join forces and launched cross-border player liquidity pooling between PokerStars’ French and Spanish-licensed sites. France saw the immediate gross gaming revenue of 8%. Recently, Portugal joined the party and boosted the European network for 27% just in the first week. Italy is expected to join in the following months.
The figures released by DGOJ show total online revenue of €163.3m, up a healthy 28% from the same period last year but a 5.7% decline from last quarter 2017’s total. The biggest piece of the profits made sports betting, just slightly over a half, generating €81.7 million. This amount represents a 15.9% year-on-year increase. In-play betting accounted for 62.5% of sports revenue and 67% of betting handle, while pre-game fixed-odds betting claimed 34.9% of revenue and 30.2% of handle.
Online casino revenues led the region with €56.6 million in revenues which is a 51% increase while online slots were 52.7% of that total. Online poker had bad figures for quite some time but has now made a huge comeback with revenues of €21.5 million. Cash games revenue is €8.4 million which makes 30% of total amount and tournaments earned €13 million which is a 50.2% of total. If we compare the total online poker revenue for the first quarter 2018 with the last quarter of 2017, there is a 5% growth.
Online bingo rose almost 30% amounting €3.5 million for revenues. Active users for first quarter climbed 25% to 800,000 while player deposits amounted €562 million, a 58.7% increase.
For now, PokerStars holds the monopoly, but soon other operators including PartyPoker, 888casino and Winimax will get their regulations and licenses in order and jump into this shared liquidity pool.
