The latest study of the French online poker market shows that despite strenuous enforcement efforts up to 47 percent of French players have accounts at operators who are not licensed in the French market.
The survey found that 23.5 percent of French players give their business exclusively to non-licensed sites, whilst a further 23.5 percent use both French licensed and foreign unlicensed sites.
The information is disturbing, because it differs so widely from site usage in horse racing and sports betting, where 73.8 percent of horse race fans, and 65.3 percent of sports punters, said they used French licensed sites.
Poker players claimed that they were dissatisfied with the lack of competitiveness of French-licensed sites and the limits imposed on the legal offer – French regulations allow poker rooms to offer only Texas hold’em and Omaha games, and operators battle with high taxation levels and a restricted player pool.
Other interesting factoids to emerge from the Observatory of Games study include:
* The average online poker player in France is well-educated, under age 30 years and is male.
* He plays daily or almost daily and prefers some social interaction.
* The vertical is male-dominated – 66.4 percent of players are of that gender.
* Poker players in France tend to start early – a quarter of all respondents said they started playing before age 20, and fifty percent said they started playing before reaching the age of 25. Over half the current players are under age 31, and 75 percent are younger than age 40.
* 43 percent of respondents said they werte disinterested in other online games.
* 58.5 percent of respondents have a minimum educational standard of a high school diploma.
* Most players reside in the larger cities and have a monthly income of less than Euro 1,500 (27.8 percent)
* Over 20 percent of players play every day, annually spending around Euro 778 on average.
* Players appear to be “early adopters” when it comes to device technologies, with 23.8 percent using mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. This compares favourably with stats on horse racing and sports betting players, only 16 percent of whom use mobile devices.