In Italy there is no law on live poker in clubs. There is an article of the Testo unico delle leggi di pubblica sicurezza, Italy’s consolidated public security act, and the Police Chiefs who apply it. Everything else follows from that: authorizations granted in one province and denied in another, the appeals, and a 2008 court case that forced the Ministry of the Interior to take a position. Its origins are reconstructed in the 2008 paper “La disciplina sportiva e il gioco del poker”, by the jurist Andrea Crismani: it is the document from which the study behind the Skill Poker Index started, to bring the problem into focus.
- Who actually decides
- A patchwork regulation
- The case that forced everyone to decide
- Trento, the first to write the rules
- The regulation that was delegated and never came
- In the void, the judges decided
- The prize that cannot be cash
- Why the Skill Poker Index are the answer
Who actually decides
The rule is article 110 of that act. It provides that the table of prohibited games be drawn up and approved by the Police Chief, and countersigned by the authority that issues the license.
That table does not contain only games of chance, which are forbidden by law. It also contains those that the Police Chief himself sees fit to forbid in the public interest, with the specific requirements and prohibitions he sees fit to impose.
It is in the second part that poker is decided. There is no rule establishing whether Texas Hold’em is chance or skill: there is an official who, province by province, assesses whether winning in that game depends on chance. And how to establish it, Crismani writes, is a factual inquiry to be carried out case by case, taking account of the rules and the combinations of that game.
A patchwork regulation
If the assessment rests on a judgment, the judgment changes with whoever makes it. Crismani says it without circling: the exercise of discretionary power by different bodies, spread across the national territory, can happen in different or even conflicting ways.
And that is how it went. The police headquarters of Bari and of Trento, and the Autonomous Province of Trento, allowed Texas Hold’em tournaments. The one in Campobasso forbade them. Same game, same rule, opposite outcomes: it is the patchwork that describes Italian live poker regulation.
On why it happens, the study behind the Skill Poker Index offers a reading. The assessment of how much chance and skill weigh is affected by the cultural and social background of whoever makes it, and by the historical moment in which it is made. Underneath there is a conceptual bug, the ambiguity about where luck ends and skill begins, and it is that bug that keeps the discipline inside the category of gambling.
The case that forced everyone to decide
In 2008 the Police Headquarters of Campobasso forbade sports poker, applying article 110. The organizers appealed to the TAR of Molise, the regional administrative court, asking for the table of prohibited games to be suspended.
On 21 May the TAR said no. With order number 128 it denied the suspension for two reasons. The first was that no rule on live poker existed, and the one on online poker could not be extended by analogy, since it expressly referred to remote games of skill. The second concerned the tournament rules, in which the judge saw elements of gambling: no limit on the tournaments that could be held in a month, the prevalence of chance over skill, and a profit motive, since the entry fees went to buy the prizes.
The case reached the Consiglio di Stato, Italy’s supreme administrative court, and there it changed direction. On 29 July, with order 4136, the Council noted an inexplicable disparity of treatment between police headquarters deciding in opposite ways on the same tournaments. It did not stop at observing it: it ordered the Ministry of the Interior to report in detail on the national situation and to take a single position at central level, within sixty days.
The sixty days passed. On 21 October, with order 5548, the Consiglio di Stato annulled the first-instance decision, finding once more a disparity of treatment compared with tournaments allowed by other police headquarters. For the time being, the tournaments could go ahead.
Trento, the first to write the rules
While the Molise case climbed through the courts, one province had already acted on its own. On 11 February 2008, with decree of the President number 9, the Autonomous Province of Trento approved a new table of prohibited games, and was the first in Italy to take a clear position on sports poker.
Tournaments were allowed, but on written conditions. The entry fee was fixed in advance and could not exceed fifty euros. Costs could not exceed ten per cent of the fee. The prize pool was made up of the entry fees alone and served only to buy prizes. Cash prizes were forbidden. And it was forbidden to increase the take by selling chips during play.
These conditions struck the point the TAR had objected to: that a cash prize was drawn from the entry fees. The fee remained, it could not disappear, but it could no longer become a win.
The regulation that was delegated and never came
The single position was one the Ministry of the Interior never took. It was Parliament that moved, but indirectly: with law 88 of 7 July 2009, article 24 paragraph 27, it delegated to an inter-ministerial regulation of finance and interior the discipline of non-remote sports poker tournaments, meaning those played in clubs and public venues.
The regulation was to set the maximum amount of the entry fee, the arrangements that exclude a profit motive, and the ban on more than one tournament on the same day in the same place. In the meantime, on 9 September 2009, a circular from the Ministry of the Interior invited police headquarters to stop tolerating any form of sports poker until those rules were published.
That regulation has never been issued. Delegated in 2009, seventeen years on it still does not exist.
In the void, the judges decided
In the void, the judges went back to deciding case by case: exactly what a regulation would have prevented. In 2013 the Corte di cassazione, Italy’s supreme court, with judgment 32835 of 29 July, established that organizing a Texas Hold’em tournament is not a criminal offence when the entry fee is contained, the starting chips are the same for everyone, players cannot buy back in with further chips and the prize pool is known before play begins: on those conditions skill prevails. In 2018 the Consiglio di Stato, deciding on a case from Puglia, returned instead to the administrative side, and to the relationship between these tournaments and the state reservation over games that involve a stake in money and a prize.
And it was still being discussed: in 2021 the online conference “Il futuro del gioco in Italia”, organized by SBC Events, was returning to the same questions.
The point of arrival is where we started. Sports poker clubs are not forbidden: they are without a discipline. And as long as the discipline is missing, the decision goes back to where it was in 2008, to a Police Chief assessing province by province whether chance or skill governs that game.
The prize that cannot be cash
And there is one point that explains why the question never closes. Where tournaments have been allowed, they have been allowed on condition that the prize pool came from the entry fees alone and that prizes were not in cash: it is the rule written in Trento in 2008, and it is the concrete form taken by a principle of law, the exclusion of a profit motive. A tournament like that does not resemble a bet. But neither is it the professional sport that recognition would require, where a cash prize is the norm and not the exception.
Why the Skill Poker Index are the answer
Seventeen years of postponement have a single cause, and it is nobody’s idleness: to write that regulation you must be able to say how much skill there is in a hand of live poker, and no tool for saying it existed. It is the same thing the Police Chief lacks when he signs or denies an authorization.
The Skill Poker Index were built for this, and they provide a deterministic, measurable reference, the same in Bari as in Campobasso. With a tool like that the assessment stops being an opinion: you do not estimate how much luck weighs, you read a value for every phase of the hand. And it is the condition that was missing for live Texas Hold’em poker to be discussed as a sport.
In the next article we will examine the so-called “structural misunderstanding”: how the birth of the tournament format inherited the limits of cash game, still favoring the random component at the expense of skills.
