Sweden is down to two licensed poker rooms — and one of them opened its licence this month

Sweden is one of Europe's strongest poker nations by money won and one of its thinnest by places to play. Both halves of that sentence can now be put precisely.

Filtering Spelinspektionen's licence and permit directory to the land-based card-game licence type returns four licence entries in total, covering two operators and two locations. Sthlm Opuk Ideell Förening, a non-profit association, holds a licence for Opuk Poker at Hagagatan 1 in Stockholm, valid from 25 September 2025 to 24 September 2027. Inlilo AB holds one for Miss Wang at Einar Hansens esplanad 37 in Malmö, valid from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028 — six days old when the register was read for this article.

What the licence actually allows

The regulator's own page for this licence type is unusually specific. It sits under chapter 9 of the Gambling Act, it is granted for recurring tournaments across the year, and it covers card games in tournament form only. More narrowly still, the permitted game is poker in which both community cards and individual cards occur. That takes in Hold'em and Omaha and leaves out draw and stud. An operator holding a commercial online licence may additionally apply for a single annual tournament.

The application fees give a sense of why the list is two names long: 80,000 kronor for a legal person, 25,000 for a natural person, 30,000 for an existing online licensee, plus 3,000 per gaming location.

The casinos are gone, and so are cash games

The reason there is nothing else on the list is that the state casino chain has been wound up. casinocosmopol.se now redirects to a Svenska Spel notice confirming that Casino Cosmopol Stockholm — the last of the four — has closed permanently. Sundsvall went in 2020 and Göteborg and Malmö in February 2024; Stockholm followed after the Riksdag resolved to wind up the state casinos and the government issued an amended owner directive on 24 April, with closure from 25 April. The notice does not print a year against those two April dates.

Svenska Spel answers the poker question on the same page without hedging: because all land-based casinos are to be prohibited, no one has the right to offer cash games, and tournament poker can be conducted to a limited extent under a special licence. Its online casino is unaffected.

One confusion is worth heading off, because it trips up venue listings constantly. The register's other land-based category, casino game, returns more than 400 Swedish locations — restaurants and bars with the Swedish restaurant-casino permission for house-banked table games. Those are not poker rooms. Miss Wang in Malmö happens to hold both licences, which is exactly how an address ends up described as a casino when its poker offering is something quite different and much more restricted.

For players, the practical summary is short: two rooms, tournaments only, Hold'em and Omaha family only, and no lawful cash game anywhere in the country. Neither licence entry lists a web address, so both clubs need contacting directly for a schedule.