A University of Joensuu report made public 17 January by Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest daily subscription-based newspaper in Scandinavia, and Finland’s leading national paper, revealed the idea for an amendment to enables Internet gamblers to claim back their losses by being paid by either the firm providing the online poker services, a credit card company, or the winning player in the game.

The ability of Finnish online poker players to continue playing their favorite pastime may become seriously affected if Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health’s plans move forward to introduce the amendment to Finland’s online gambling laws

The Ministry feels that if such a law were enacted, foreign operators of Internet poker sites would likely prevent Finnish players from taking part in the game, effectively banning Finnish players, since a player protected by such a law would be too great a risk to the game organizer.

The Ministry commissioned the University to look into ways of protecting gambling addicts and children from the dangers of online gambling.

The idea of a payback scheme was conceived by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health civil servants together with the compiler of the report, the University of Joensuu professor of Law and Economics Kalle Maatta. According to Maatta, such a law does not yet exist anywhere in the world.

The idea of the law is not to force citizens to stop gambling online, but merely to provide them with the opportunity to claim back their losses that they incurred while, for example, they played online poker when drunk.

Finns are quite eager players at online poker-tables. Around EUR 150 million a year (about USD $220 million, or GBP 110 million) is thought to be taken by online poker firms from Finns alone.

Measured against head of population, the Finns are fourth in the world tables of spending on gambling. The newspaper says that around 40,000 Finns have problems arising out of a gambling habit, which is as many as in The Netherlands, a country with three times the population.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Online Poker, Poker Industry News, Poker Players, Poker Winners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.