The Serbian Poker Federation has been extremely active since the beginning of 2014 and are the driving force behind the development and improvement of Serbian poker players.

The federation launched an ‘Open Poker School’ for poker training and the ‘Serbian Poker League’ as a competitive poker league.

The Open Poker School gives players the opportunity to practice their poker skills every day at 12 pm. The tournaments are being held between 26th of March and  23th of June. There will be 90 online tournaments hosted and the Serbian Poker Federation has made a special  type of ranking system for competition.
The best Open Poker School players or “poker students” will have the opportunity to participate at the final table, and compete for the prize of €500. Each tournaments distributes €25 from the prize pool to top ranked players.

Their main project in this period is the Spring Poker League, that has been a very successful competition so far.

“After 12 hosted tournaments in the Spring Poker League, we had 430 participants and over 40 hours of game play, so we can already recognize a skill positioning itself in top of the ranking list. We are very excited to see our players fighting for their position, and valuable rewards, in the second part of this league. Top 9 ranked players will play the final table with a prize pool of €1000 and the winner will win a package worth of €1500 for a regional poker event of our choice. Above all, each tournament has a prize pool of €250 so we are sure that these prizes will maintain player focus and motivation to show us the best of their poker skills!” said Verica Lukic, the SPF Communication & Public Affairs Manager.

IFP congratulates our Serbian member nation, the Serbian Poker Federation, on its success and encourages all our members to follow in their footsteps.

The seventh edition of the conference took place on May 14th & 15th, was hosted by the Institute for International Research and had the entire industry’s big players in attendance.

Poker was discussed alongside topics such as change in legal framework, the government gaming agenda or social media games.

This year marked the first time that the Austrian Pokersport Association (APSA) was invited to the conference and President Martin Sturc took the chance to hold a guest lecture titled Poker: “if in need of luck, you play bad” speaking about pokers right to exist as a sport.

His annotations, accompanied by scientific data, backed up once more the fact that poker is a skill game and should be acknowledged as a mind sport.

In his 25 minutes on stage Martin Sturc also showcased excerpts of his still unpublished master thesis “skill beats luck – the skillfactor in poker”. On the basis of this thesis and game-theory analysis he pointed out weaknesses in the present definition of gambling and presented a new method on how to classify skill games.

It is one mayor objective of the APSA for Poker to be an acknowledged and accepted skill game in Austria. The appearance at the 7th Gaming & Betting Conference was yet another step in the right direction.