As I told you guys before I LOVE KRUKAN which is my local poker club in Stockholm. When it comes to the Swedish law this is an illegal poker club…or? Over the last few years I’ve watched and read about those raids at poker clubs. I’ve also read about the trials in court where the prosecutor hasn’t really had anything real to come up with and how they’ve been in court with not a real case cause when it comes to poker they’re clueless. When it comes to those small, really innocent tournaments they haven’t had a case. So last year we all read the verdict and there it was, what we’ve all been waiting for; the verdict that says: tournament poker is about skill not about gambling which it’s all about.

We have a law in Sweden. The gambling law. If you are not Svenska Spel (the government owned gambling operator) you are not allowed to have anything to do when it comes to gambling or lottery. They are the only one’s allowed. But here was the leak. We got them to proof that tournament poker is about skill and thats why they couldn’t give a conviction.

Krukan is a nice and warm place where I even took my father to so he could experience what it feels like to play poker for real. I couldn’t take him to the government owned casino. The tournaments they have there is a joke and he never tried cash games. Krukan is a place where people go to just to meet their friends to play a tournament for small amounts of money and more for the fun of it than anything else. The people who runs it are normal Swedish guys who cares about others. This is something you don’t see at the casino. They don’t care about anything else than to make money. They only want you there cause of then money you bring. You don’t go there just to hand out. People go to Krukan and to other poker clubs all around Sweden just because of this reason nothing else. They actually don’t care about winning or losing. Sometimes they won, sometimes they don’t but it doesn’t matter. They do it cause it’s their hobby.

Last night I went to Krukan to play the Friday Deepstack. It’s a nice tourney with approx $75 buy-in and with 90 people in it. You have to play for at least six or seven hours just to make it to the final table. After three hours in the tournament with half the field left I was just picking up my chips after winning a pot and suddenly I see this police men standing to my right. She told us all to just sit tight and wait for further directions… I then saw like 20 other uniformed policemen’s in the tournament area (we were like 100 people in the club by that point).

After few minutes they told us to hold our hands so they could see them. “Is this a joke?”, I said to my opponent. “Who does she think we are?”

Then they started to talk to all of us one by one. First we had to show id’s and then they wanted out chip count and not in the way I normally do them on the tour “How many pink chips do you have? How many red?” etc…

Interesting chipcount

One and a half hour later they let us all go apart from the owner who’s a guy in my age. A typical normal Swedish, sweet, guy who are still in remand prison. Yes. This is not a joke! It’s more than 24 hours now and he’s still there the poor thing. The only thing he’s done wrong is to rent a place for us all to play poker in and to arrange those tournaments who we still don’t know if they are legal or not… Until it’s been in the Supreme Court from the last couple of cases there’s nothing to go on here.

The sickest thing here is that Sweden is a part of the European Union where it’s against THEIR law to have monopoly on stuff. They’ve already given Sweden warnings when it comes to the monopolies we have but Sweden has ignored this and still runs their thing…

I really hope that this in some way will give open the eyes of the European Union again. Me and loads of others are now gonna push this really hard to make a statement bot national and international. I’ve written some really controversial blogs about it in Swedish (read HERE) and started a Facebook group (had 170 members after the first hours) and this is only the beginning. I’m really upset at the moment and I wont let this go until we’ve succeed to get tournament poker in Sweden (outside the casino) legal…TRUST ME

While waiting I today spent the night at a friends house with a barbecue and a home game. I brought my kid and his friend who had a great time the whole night…and so did we *s*. I didn’t win the tourney but I won the slowroller side bet after thinking for a minute before calling myself all-in pre with aces. They got cracked by tens but it was soooo worth it. My first slowroll in my life!

Chill on the balcony…a really nice one at one of the nicest parts of Stockholm

The best kid in the world…mine

We we’re 14 in the S&G…