Official language: Greek
Population: 11,216,708
Currency: Euro (EUR)

Current Exchange Rate
1 GBP = 1.0681 EUR
1 USD = 0.6754 EUR

Poker in Greece
Poker, like all card games, is very popular in Greece. Greece even has several of its own variations of poker. Collectively these are called Poka. The games are traditionally played around Chrismas and New Years at home. Typically, the game is played for trivial amounts of money, and is more for fun than for profit.

In spite of these casual Poka games, Greek law makes it illegal to play poker for large money outside of a casino environment. There are just 17 casinos running today across Greece, and 10 of them are located in the outlying islands – only two can be found in Athens. This makes poker games hard to find. Fortunately, all casinos offer poker in Greece, and they host regular poker tournaments as well.

Online Poker in Greece
The laws governing online poker in Greece are even stricter. They forbid any kind of online gambling within the country, and even tried to ban electronic games altogether in 2002 to control it. The law has been revised over the years, and today only forbids internet cafes and other public venues from offering electronic games of any kind, whether they involve gambling or not.

The EU is not happy with the situation in Greece and its gambling monopolies, and has been putting strong pressure on the Greek government to make changes to the situation. If successful, the world will definitely see more Greek online poker sites. In spite of the laws, thousands of Greeks play online poker, and the numbers grow every year.