Live poker tournaments broken in Italy
Following the ban of live poker tournaments in Italy, last Friday a new Facebook group entitled “Pokeristi Sportivi Uniti” (Poker Tournament Players United) was created. The group is composed of poker tournament players, poker fans, and friends and is completely autonomous and independent of any Federation or association.
The aim of the group is to find a temporary solution to overcome the ban imposed last Friday on live poker tournaments in Italian poker clubs. The ban comes directly from the Italian Home Office and results from the fact that rules on requesting authorization(s) to organize live poker tournaments have yet to be defined. In the meantime, a hard line has been therefore applied: no live poker tournament allowed in Italy
“Numbers are impressive”, says Giangia Manelli, one of the founders of the movement “when we created the group the aim was to defend small tournaments organized by local clubs with 30 euro buy-ins. In these kind of tournaments, laws have always been respected, with a bit of flexibility due to the small size of the organizing clubs, and now the total ban of live tournaments risks causing the growth of illegal tournaments.”
The reasons for this drastic measure are unclear. Why didn’t they wait for the new regulation on authorizations to be ratified? Was it a mistake made during the preparation of the law? Was someone not paying careful enough attention?
“I can’t answer these questions, but I can say that the numbers of our Facebook Group “Poker Tournament Players United” sent a clear message: 1.500 participants in the first 24 hours, doubled the day after. Today is Monday and despite the weekend, people worked on the group which reached 4.600 participants. This shows how important this issue is to Italian people, and the strength of means such as the Internet and Facebook, which made all this possible.”
Numbers are significant, but did you register any reaction against your initiative? Maybe someone who thinks that the ban is a justified measure…
“We have had no adverse reactions! We only had 3 messages of people who considered it excessive to receive 1 message a day from the Group, a request from pokerroom.com to administer the group, some advertisements and some mischief makers, that we found out are working for online poker rooms. Being coherent in Italy is a matter of creativity”
What will be “Poker Tournament Players United” next moves?
“We are still in a phase of building the group and it is important to be united. Among our members there are lawyers, managers, journalists, politicians and also people who can pull the right strings to try and obtain a temporary solution until the new regulation is in force. For the time being, we want to work with the institutions to find a lawful solution. I want to take this chance to thank all the participants in the group. We will go ahead united in the passion for poker tournaments.”
From all the GamblingPlanet team, we’d like to wish good luck to Giangia Manelli and the Group “Poker Tournament Players United”. Thank you very much for your initiative.