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What is Mount Mazuma?
The Netherlands online gambling market has been the subject of many column inches and much speculation thanks to regulation that has been largely described as heavy-handed and perhaps a little short-sighted – even by the country’s own regulator.
The triumvirate of Netherlands, Germany and Sweden is often held up as an example of how not to regulate, with all three countries haemorrhaging players to waiting illegal operators. So what is public sentiment like towards operators? “My feeling is that if you look at public sentiment, they don’t see really the difference between online and land-based,” says Petra. “If you look into what they’re saying, they’re primarily talking online. But for the general public, there is no difference [between the channels] in that respect.”
She believes the sentiment towards gambling among the Dutch public is comparable to the UK, Finland, Germany, France. “So, very tense,” she says.
What is Mount Mazuma?
During a global pandemic, it might have been assumed that poker would go the way of live music festivals, with the much-photographed mass gatherings of poker tournaments being such a draw to new and aspirational poker players.
Poker, however, has shown its hand during the current COVID-19 crisis and it’s a pairing of resilience and poker, hole cards showing strength and character. Online poker has thrived, poker has pivoted to accommodate those new players and the industry has more than survived.
Perhaps the hand that poker itself has shown is pocket kings, but every cowboy has to ride into the sunset one day and that day has arrived for the Poker page on the CalvinAyre.com website.
How to play Mount Mazuma
In Sweden, Spelinspektionen recently flagged affiliates and social media as key channels for black market advertising and how affiliate networks redirect search traffic towards unlicensed operators.
Regulators have so far focused mainly on monitoring paid advertising. In Germany, the GGL credited an updated Google ad policy with reducing black market visibility. Yet, it acknowledged that illegal operators could still achieve visibility in organic search through SEO manipulation.
This points to a wider shift towards addressing organic search signals and domain-level practices such as doorway pages, an issue also raised in the UK, where research has linked black market migration to search-driven promotion and SEO exploitation.
