{"id":3183,"date":"2014-02-18T16:20:30","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T20:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/?p=3183"},"modified":"2014-02-19T16:50:07","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T20:50:07","slug":"norway-finally-legalizing-poker-tournaments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/norway-finally-legalizing-poker-tournaments","title":{"rendered":"Norway Finally legalizing Poker Tournaments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/norway-legalizing-poker-tournaments.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/norway-legalizing-poker-tournaments.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"norway-legalizing-poker-tournaments\" width=\"265\" height=\"248\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-3185\" \/><\/a>Norway has spawned several world-famous poker pros in Annette Obrestad, Johnny Lodden and Thor Hansen. This is quite amazing when you consider that these players can&#8217;t even enjoy a legal poker tournament on their home soil. Luckily, that&#8217;s set to change with Norway\u2019s Culture Minister, Thorhild Widvey, calling for the legalization of poker tourneys.<\/p>\n<p>At this time, the only forms of legal gaming in Norway are the lottery and limited sports betting. Widvey and other politicians in the country&#8217;s newly elected Progress Party coalition government are moving towards expanding the gaming market to capitalize on revenue.<\/p>\n<p>This expanded market will most likely include poker as Widvey recently wrote, &#8220;I hope we can have a regulatory framework in place in time for a Norway championship of poker to be held in Norway in 2015&#8230; the Gaming Act permits the government to allow tournaments through regulation and therefore it is probably not a matter for Parliament.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A Norwegian Poker Championship would definitely be a great way to usher in a new era of poker freedoms. However, Norwegian players shouldn&#8217;t expect too many freedoms because the current proposal only allows for low stakes tournaments. But any tournament is better than none, even if buy-ins are capped at $500 (or whatever the case may be).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting timing that Norway is moving closing towards legalizing poker tournaments. Just a couple of months ago, Ola \u201cOdd Oddsen\u201d Amundsgaard challenged politician Erlan Wiborg to a PLO heads-up match. <\/p>\n<p>The idea was to beat Wiborg bad enough that Amundsgaard could show poker is indeed a game of skill. He definitely accomplished this feat too after Wiborg lost $2,666 in their first online session and quickly threw in the towel. We have to think that this publicity might have a little to do with generating more government goodwill towards poker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Norway has spawned several world-famous poker pros in Annette Obrestad, Johnny Lodden and Thor Hansen. This is quite amazing when you consider that these players can&#8217;t even enjoy a legal poker tournament on their home soil. Luckily, that&#8217;s set to change with Norway\u2019s Culture Minister, Thorhild Widvey, calling for the legalization of poker tourneys. At [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,72],"tags":[1538,638,1166,1536,1541,1540,1542,1537,1539],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3183"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3187,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3183\/revisions\/3187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepokerpractice.com\/poker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}