Europe's Softest Player Pool Is Still Walled Off — But GGPoker Is Working to Open It

Italy built Europe's first regulated online poker market in 2008, and built it closed. Tournaments came first, cash games followed in 2011, and licensed operators were permitted to serve Italian residents only. The reasoning was fiscal: keep the revenue inside the country.

France and Spain copied the model, then changed their minds. In 2017 they signed a shared-liquidity agreement, launched a combined network in 2018, and Portugal joined afterwards.

The agreement was signed in Rome. Italy was a signatory. Italy never implemented it.

Eighteen years on, Italy is still the largest segregated online poker market in Europe — and for a specific type of player, that has quietly become the most interesting fact in European online poker.

See the private iPoker Italy deal on RakeRace →

Segregation is generally treated as a problem. Smaller prize pools, thinner cash tables, fewer formats running at 3am. For operators, that's exactly what it is.

For a winning player, the equation runs the other way.

A ring-fenced pool never receives the thing that kills game quality: an influx of international regulars. When France, Spain and Portugal merged, their pools didn't just get bigger — they got harder, because the same cross-border grinders now had access to all three. Italy skipped that step. The players sitting in Italian lobbies today are, overwhelmingly, the same domestic population that has been there since 2011, fed continuously by casino and sportsbook cross-sell from operators serving a country of nearly 60 million people.

The scale is the part people underestimate. PokerStars Italy alone attracts more traffic than the entire Southern European shared network of France, Spain and Portugal combined. It hosts tournament series with multi-million-euro guarantees, and the Italian Sunday Million returns periodically with a €1 million guarantee.

So: a large pool, sustained volume, real guarantees — and none of the reg density that comes with open borders. That combination doesn't exist anywhere else in regulated Europe.

RakeRace's own room assessment puts it bluntly: untouched fish ponds on the segregated markets.

That's the part worth reading carefully, because it's the countdown.

The debate reopened after Marco Trucco, formerly Managing Director of GGPoker Europe, said publicly that global liquidity in Italy remains a long-term company objective. His framing was direct: <cite index="4-1">"This is exactly what GGPoker will bring to Italy: global liquidity."</cite>

He also suggested that parts of the industry keep lobbying against reform precisely because they don't want to lose one of their last protected markets. Read that from a grinder's perspective and it's an admission of exactly what's being protected — and what would be lost if it weren't.

This is not a sudden campaign. GGPoker has spent years working with Italian consultants, industry associations and media to argue that an international player pool would produce bigger tournament prize pools, more cash-game traffic, a better player experience, and higher long-term tax revenue.

Opposition is real and organised. In 2025, MP Mauro Del Barba formally challenged the government after GGPoker appeared before the Senate Finance Committee, arguing that an unlicensed operator shouldn't shape Italian gambling policy, and alleging that GGPoker was serving Italian customers.

GGPoker rejected both claims — stating it does not operate in the Italian regulated market, does not accept Italian residents, and complies fully with Italian law — and characterised its participation as offering professional views on regulatory development.

Italy isn't isolated. In Ontario, GGPoker runs a ring-fenced network separate from its global platform under provincial rules. The Supreme Court of Canada is expected to consider later this year whether Ontario players may legally share tables with players from other jurisdictions. Alberta has meanwhile opened its own regulated market, which raises the prospect of a Canadian inter-provincial pool.

If Canada rules in favour of shared liquidity, the precedent value in Rome is obvious.

Bigger prize pools are good news for the operator and for the recreational player. For the person currently beating a protected pool, the opening is the event that ends the opportunity. Nobody knows the date. That's precisely why the useful move is to be set up before there is one.

This is where the iPoker Italy deal stops resembling a normal room signup, and where being straight with you matters more than a smooth funnel.

It is not self-serve. There is no registration button that opens an account in ninety seconds. The registration route and the gameplay setup differ substantially from a standard room, which is why the process runs through RakeRace support directly rather than a public form.

There is a volume floor. These rooms carry monthly seat costs, so the deal is recommended only for players who reliably generate more than €250 in rake per month. Below that threshold, the economics don't work in your favour and we'd rather tell you now than after you've set it up.

Withdrawals run through an external agent. RakeRace's assessment scores withdrawal reliability at 6/10 here — no known payout problems, but the route is indirect rather than a direct cashier. The recommendation that follows from that is straightforward: keep only a working bankroll in the account, not your savings.

The overall rating is 5.17/10, and that's deliberate. This isn't a top-rated room by our own scoring, and we're not going to present it as one. It scores what it scores because access is agent-mediated and the structure is unconventional. What it offers instead is the one thing the highly-rated rooms cannot: a player pool nobody has spent five years solving.

What is solid: the Italian room sits on the iPoker network with a local licence, giving it materially stronger network-level reliability than the rating alone suggests. Deposits and withdrawals move quickly, the rakeback arrives on schedule, and player feedback we've collected has been consistently positive. Payments via Skrill; Windows and macOS clients.

Work through these before contacting support. If any answer is no, a standard room serves you better and we'll say so.

• Do you clear €250+ in rake most months? If not, look at RedStar Poker on the international iPoker network or GGPoker instead.
• Are you a winning player? The entire value proposition here is pool composition. If you're not beating your current games, a softer pool postpones the problem rather than solving it.
• Are you comfortable with a non-standard setup? Different registration route, agent-based withdrawals, a working bankroll rather than a full one.
• Do you want this before the market changes? Shared liquidity has no timetable. It also has an operator with real resources pushing for it, and a live test case in Canada.

Four yeses means it's worth a conversation.

• Open the iPoker Italy deal page and read the reliability breakdown in full — including the parts that score low.
• Contact RakeRace support via the support page, Telegram or Teams. Tell us your typical monthly rake volume and preferred stakes and formats.
• We confirm eligibility and current availability. Access here is finite and conditions vary; we'll tell you what's open rather than sell you a seat that isn't.
• We walk you through the setup personally. Because it isn't a standard registration, we don't leave you with a link and a checklist.

Start the conversation →

Italy has been closed for eighteen years, which makes it easy to assume it always will be. But there's now an operator with serious resources arguing the case, a parallel test running through the Canadian courts, and an industry that increasingly treats segregation as an outdated model.

When it opens — whenever that is — the prize pools get bigger and the games get harder. Both at once.

Until then, it's the softest large pool in regulated Europe, and it's reachable.

See the private iPoker Italy deal →

Related reading: GGPoker pushes for shared liquidity in Italy · iPoker Italy deal · Betfair Poker left iPoker — what to do next · RedStar Poker Review · GGPoker Review · PokerStars Review · Current rake races and chases · Rakeback calculator

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