02 July 2025
The Hungarian Parliament approved, with 235 votes against 69, the new gambling law. The new legislation assumes the allocation of 5 years gambling licenses upon the payment of a fee of €340,245.97. At other latitudes, the governments of Bulgaria and Lebanon have ordered ISPs to block access to online gambling sites.
A law that was approved in Budapest requires that gambling rooms will have to pay 22.5% tax on income, being that players will be exempt from paying taxes. All sites that do not obtain an online gambling license will be placed on a black list, and ISPs will have to block access to these sites.
In Bulgaria, the Gambling State Commission (SCG) filed an action in the Districtal Court of Sofia, asking that access to online gambling sites were blocked. The request was accepted by the Court, who immediately ordered the blockade of a list of online gaming websites - a list that takes up 22 pages.
So far, the SCG has only received three applications for licenses. Speaking to the local site economy.bg, a spokesman for the SCG says that the blacklist is dynamic, meaning that if a company acquires a license, it will be automatically removed from the list. By decision of the SCG, the players with money in blacklisted rooms will have a period of three days to withdraw their money, before the access is effectively blocked.
Lebanon was Another country that has moved to block access to online gambling sites. This measure began to be felt on June 15 - but at that date, only a few ISPs had blocked the access to PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. Players with different ISPs were able to play in these rooms.
As the days went by, other rooms began to have access blocked, and the measure has spread to all ISPs. In that country, players still don't have any indication on how will they be able to recover the money that they keep on blocked online poker rooms.
As of now, only a room operates in Lebanon: Starsofholdem, a room that runs on Lebanese capital, operating from Costa Rica, which claims to be the only room paying taxes to the local government.
