The WestSpiel name has gone: Germany's NRW casinos now answer to MERKUR Spielbanken

Anyone typing the old address for Germany's best-known casino group will now land somewhere else. As of 29 September 2026 westspiel.de returns a redirect to merkur-spielbanken.de: the WestSpiel brand, which ran the state-owned casinos of North Rhine-Westphalia for decades, has no site of its own left.

The destination site explains the background in its own words, saying that with the acquisition of the WESTSPIEL group in 2021 and its five North Rhine-Westphalian casinos, the Gauselmann group increased the number of its German casinos. Today merkur-spielbanken.de lists sixteen locations: six in North Rhine-Westphalia — Aachen, Bad Oeynhausen, Dortmund, Duisburg, Monheim and Siegburg — three in Saxony-Anhalt, and ten in Lower Saxony. The individual houses keep their own domains, with Duisburg at casino-duisburg.de and the Dortmund casino still trading online as spielbank-hohensyburg.de.

For poker players the practical point is about searching, not about the tables: the rooms are the same rooms, but the group name attached to them in older guides, tournament listings and forum posts no longer leads anywhere. Our German venue pages for the six NRW houses are already filed under their MERKUR names.

One caution that applies to all of them. German casinos routinely list "Poker" among their table games when what they deal is a dealer-banked hold'em variant rather than players competing against each other, and they tend to hide the real game information under a house page rather than a poker page. Where we have not read a clear statement of player-versus-player play for a given house, our venue page says so rather than assuming.