What is the Legal Landscape of Polish Online Casinos

The legal landscape of Polish online gambling is a complex issue that necessitates an extensive discussion of the existing laws and regulations and provides an outlook for future developments. We will do just that in this article and offer you a guide to gambling at online casinos in Poland.

Polish Gambling Laws

Polish laws are very strict when it comes to gambling. Unfortunately, online gambling is severely restricted in the country. Curiously, that has not always been the case. Once Poland was very friendly towards online casinos, but that is no more, so we will explore what led to the tight regulations currently in place.

Online gambling used to be unregulated in Poland, thus it wasn’t a crime to offer or participate in it. Perhaps drawing on the success of the legal online gambling industries of other European countries, Poland sought to legalise and regulate online gambling in 2008.

These plans were scrapped when a big scandal was uncovered in 2009. Allegedly, a few Polish government officials, including the sports minister, the head of the anti-corruption office, the minister of the inferior and the minister of the justice department, met with gambling business representative in attempt for the latter to lower the newly-proposed tax hike on gambling.

All of these officials either resigned or were fired by Prime Minister Donald Tusk for supposedly participating in lobbying efforts. Although online gambling was not involved in these discussions, since it was not legal to begin with, it took the brunt of the scandal.

The Polish government wanted to show it felt towards lobbying in the worst way possible – by restricting many forms of gambling. The very same year, Poland introduced the Gambling Act of 2009, one of the harshest gambling laws in Europe.

According to the Act, private online casinos are illegal. In particular, the Act forbids many games of chance to be played online such as slots and roulette, but since the language is very vague, it essentially includes card games involving skill like poker and blackjack.

To explain it further, the Act forbids both Polish online casinos and offshore online casinos. Gambling operators found to be disobeying the law were subject to hefty fines.

Still, the Act did not forbid all types of gambling. Online sports betting was legalised and private operators could apply for a gambling licence from the Polish Ministry of Finance which regulates gambling in the country. Additionally, privately held land-based casinos and sportsbooks were allowed to operate.

Availability of Online Casinos in Poland

You might be asking yourself why we promised you a guide to online casinos in Poland earlier if there were no options available. To answer your question, since the passing of the Gambling Act of 2009, certain amendments were added which made online gambling possible, though still restricted.

If you know more about the legal landscape of gambling in other countries members of the European Union, then you probably guessed right that the European Court of Justice sought to pressure Poland into amending its gambling laws.

In 2012, the European Court of Justice threatened Poland with sanctions for neglecting to inform the EU Commission of its new regulatory measures as they could affect the European market as a whole.

It should be noted the European Union does allow member-states to ban forms of gambling, so the legal situation is murky. The EU cannot ask or make Poland legalise online casino gambling.

Still, Poland, likely in an attempt to avoid sanctions, allowed access to EEA-based online casinos when it stopped blocking casino transactions in 2015.

However, the Polish government kind of backtracked on that with a new amendment to the Act in 2017. The 2017 amendment was much more restrictive in comparison to previous ones. New measures were adopted which essentially blocked transactions to unlicensed online casinos.

Additionally, the government started blacklisting providers. Currently, over 15,000 online casinos are blacklisted in Poland. Polish players will see a warning when they visit a blacklisted site. Operators are allowed to appeal their blacklisted status, although they are not warned when their website enters the registry.

The new amendment to the Act, however, made one crucial mistake. It “accidentally” legalised online casino gambling as long as it’s provided by the state-owned firm Totalizator Sportowy Sp. z o.o.; the reason why this was a mistake is because Poland essentially created a monopoly.

According to the laws of the European Union, member-states share a singular open market, so if a business is registered, licenced and regulated by one member-state, it should be allowed to apply for an operational licence, provided that the country punishing the business allows the activity on its territory (in this case online casino gambling).

Since Polish players can now gamble online through Totalizator Sportowy Sp. z o.o., private businesses should technically be allowed to operate as well. While the European Court of Justice has not involved itself in that matter yet, it’s possible it would in the future, especially if an online casino appeals to it.

For example, Hungary had a legal online gambling industry but it allowed only its state-owned company to conduct it. In 2006, the EU Court of Justice ruled that Hungary had to allow EU-based operators and Hungary obliged, but this was only after SportsBet appealed to the court for support.

Conclusion

The legal case that led to the opening of the Hungarian online gambling market makes us hopeful that a similar legal case involving Poland could finally allow for commercial online casinos. In the meantime, Polish players can play at EU-based online casinos which have not been blacklisted by the Ministry of Finance.

FAQ

Thank you for reading our article on the legality of online gambling in Poland. Below you can also see the most common questions on the topic: