Francaise des Jeux to launch e-poker with Barrière

FRANCAISE DES Jeux (FDJ), the French lottery and sports betting monopoly, has signed a deal with casino group Barrière to launch an online poker site, according to reports in French newspaper Le Figaro.

Although FDJ signed a licensing deal for online poker with Californian software developer CyberArts in May 2009, the FDJ-Barrière tie is likely to result from political pressure from the French authorities, who are keen to ensure one of its major casino operators is not left behind in the online poker boom expected once France’s regulation of its online gaming market takes effect this year.

Greek lottery systems provider Intralot recently took a 35% stake in CyberArts and might have been expected to be unhappy at losing such a major client so soon after signing the deal with the US software firm.

However according to eGaming Review‘s French media partner, iGaming France, the Greek company sees the FDJ-Barrière deal as a positive, because it does not believe Barrière’s technology, much of which will be based on the 3D-casino technology it uses for Lecroupier.com, is strong enough to be able to deal with online poker on the scale anticipated.

The deal will see FDJ benefit exclusively from the Barrière casino estate for poker tournaments, potentially posing a threat to theFrench leg of PokerStars’s European Poker Tour, which is due to be hosted at Barrière’s Deauville casino at the end of this month but may have to find a different venue for its 2011 event.

All parties were unavailable for comment at the time of writing.

In other French egaming news recently, Eurosportbet’s future is in doubt after a management takover by parent company Bouyges, while FDJ’s sports betting contemporary Pari-Mutuel Urbain signed a sponsorship deal with Federation Francaise de Football.