France’s Cash game poker sees continuous decline

The constant decline in online poker market in France was the major reason why the country joined the player pool merger with countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal. The launch of the network will be a matter of time following the four countries signed their first shared online poker liquidity agreement.
To comment on the fate of the project at this stage would be too early. The French online gambling regulator, ARJEL published iGaming industry’s performance in the second quarter of the year on Wednesday. In general, the results looked positive, but the story for cash game online poker was very different.
The overall online poker revenue at the end of the second quarter on June 30, 2017, was €57 million up by 3% from the previous year €55 million cashed at the same period of 2016. For tournament poker, the revenues totalled €34.6 million from the same period the previous year, up by 6%.
Despite such growth in tournament poker since 2012, the cash games kept declining through the second quarter of 2017.
The figures released by ARJEL reveal the cash game revenue decreased 1% during the review period to €22 million, with the cash stakes dropped by 0.4% year-on-year to €850 million. From €6.2 billion in 2012 the stakes came down to €3.6 billion in 2016, while the entry fees for tournaments grew from almost €1.4 billion in 2012 to nearly €1.9 billion in 2016.
Source: Igaming