Come January 1st 2012, 38 websites/operators will be the first to provide legal online gambling to residents of Denmark. The Danish “orderly” regulatory framework will have each operator pay a 20% tax on their gross income. Pokerstars, 888 Poker, Betfair and Unibet are among those who managed to secure a license.
Danish minister of taxation Thor Möger Pedersen issued a warning to unlicensed sites who continue to service Danish players: “The orderly market means, among other things, that all gambling operators without a licence from 1 January 2012 risk that their website or payments will be blocked.” We could very well see the Danish government going after unlicensed sites in a similar manner to how the Department of Justice dealt with non-complying sites such as Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker on April 15th.
Denmark has a long history with online gambling; they were among the first people to seek gambling entertainment online in the 1990s. This was in part due to a widely viewed television special in which a Danish affiliate portal owner explained to people how they could profit from gambling websites. He explained how online casinos offered sign up and deposit bonuses with rollover rates so small that most of the time the player could turn a profit.
Many Danes went on to “bonus whore” large numbers of online casinos, often by playing the low house edge game of blackjack to clear their bonuses. The impact of this influx of Danish players was so great, that many sites changed their terms and conditions to increase the rollover rate, or even outright ban players from Denmark.