Playtech to possibly create first regulated shared market?

According to their statement, they are merging an Austrian and a Finnish regulated poker site, check out the details below!

Ever since the first segregated online poker markets were created there have been talks about shared markets between various regulated markets. The leaders of the biggest European segregated markets have already discussed this issue a lot but as of now no major step has been taken in this direction.

That's why it's such big news that Playtech, the owners of the iPoker network (which includes rooms like Everest Poker and Coral Poker) is planning to create the first shared market.

The company has announced that they will soon be merging Ray.FI (a site which enjoys a monopoly status in Finland) with Win2day, a regulated Austrian site owned by Casinos Austria.

Both rooms use the iPoker software so there are no obstacles in the way of the merge. Ray Poker will be rebranded Veikkaus Poker after the merge.

Currently the online poker market can be divided into three segments. Open, regulated markets such as the United Kingdom or Denmark, segregated markets such as France and Spain and unregulated, open ''gray'' markets. This dysfunctional system has started to fall apart in the past few years with traffic falling drastically year by year in every segregated market.

In the United States the sharing of player pools amongst legalized markets has already been made legal in 2014 under the Multi State Internet gaming act, the problem is that there are only three states where it's legal to play online poker (Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware) and these markets are very small even when combined.