

UK residents have had legal access to all the poker variants available online since the earliest days of the industry. What is or is not legal in the United Kingdom?

On the contrary, the British regulators were counting on sites to pay their dues voluntarily. As hard as it is to believe, the UK didn’t have any regulations mandating poker sites pay relevant operator-side taxes. It simply imposed a point-of-consumption tax on UK-facing operators. Keep in mind this bill did not fence-off the UK gambling market. The second was the 2014 Gambling Bill, which reintroduced licenses for offshore gambling sites looking to offer services to UK residents. It explicitly allowed UK-based players to play on poker platforms of their own choosing, outlawed cheating, and transferred licensing authority to local regulatory bodies. The first was the Gambling Act of 2005, which essentially guaranteed players the freedoms they were already enjoying at the time. Two important, 21st-century legal documents outlined regulations pertaining specifically to online poker. United Kingdom real money online poker laws However, this is not at all surprising, considering how uncompetitive the UK’s tax system is when compared to the likes of Gibraltar or Isle of Man. The only negative aspect of the UK’s legal situation is that the majority of quintessentially British gambling businesses, such as Ladbrokes, Bet365, and William Hill, moved their headquarters offshore. Most importantly, they don’t have to settle for second-class networks when picking poker platforms. UK citizens don’t have to deal with the legal ambiguities and country restrictions that seem to plague the global poker scene these days, nor do they have to use VPNs to play on unregulated offshore poker sites. No consumer taxes, permissive regulations, and strong modern gambling traditions have shaped it into a European iGaming enthusiast’s dream. The United Kingdom is readily recognized as one of the most, if not the most, online poker-friendly countries in the world.
