Poker in Peru — card rooms, festivals and the online rules

Peru plays poker in two places at once: a handful of long-standing casino card rooms in Lima and a travelling festival circuit that deliberately leaves the capital, and an online market that has been under licence since 2022 and under active enforcement since.

Is poker legal in Peru?

Yes. Land-based casinos and card rooms operate under licence, and the live tournament scene runs openly — the National Series of Poker takes festivals to Arequipa, Chiclayo and Piura as well as Lima, and Lima's own rooms run their own events.

Online is the part that changed. Ley N° 31557, approved by Congress on 25 July 2022 and promulgated on 12 August 2022, brought remote gaming and remote sports betting under a licensing regime. Article 5 makes the Ministerio de Comercio Exterior y Turismo — Mincetur — the national administrative authority. Article 7 requires an operating authorisation, valid for six calendar years and renewable, before a platform may be run for Peruvian players; Article 8 adds a separate two-year authorisation and registration for the platform itself. Article 30 prohibits advertising a platform that Mincetur has not previously authorised.

The law does not name poker specifically. It defines online games and betting in general terms in Articles 3.2 and 3.7, and poker falls inside that definition rather than being carved out.

The enforcement campaign is real

Mincetur is not treating the licence requirement as paperwork. On 2 October 2026 the ministry announced it had blocked 50 further platforms serving Peruvian players without authorisation, bringing the year's total to 86 out of 157 earmarked for blocking, and said illegal online supply had fallen by more than half. The blocking is carried out with the transport and communications ministry, which controls the internet providers.

For a player, the risk is not prosecution — it is a site becoming unreachable from a Peruvian connection with a balance still on it. The sensible habit is to check that an operator holds a current Mincetur authorisation before depositing, rather than trusting a licence badge in a page footer.

Age and tax

Ley 31557 restricts play to adults. Article 3.10 defines a player as a natural person of legal age and Article 28.1 bars minors; the statute does not print a numeric age, which in Peru means 18.

The tax falls on operators, not players. Article 42 sets the impuesto a los juegos a distancia at 12% of the taxable base, Article 40 names the taxpayers as Peruvian companies and branches of foreign companies running the platforms, and Article 43 assigns collection to SUNAT. Nothing in the statute imposes that tax on a player's winnings. How an individual's poker results are treated for income tax is a separate question that depends on whether the play is occasional or habitual, and that is a question for a Peruvian accountant rather than for us.

The live calendar

Two threads are worth following. The National Series of Poker is the travelling circuit: its Arequipa week, 12 to 18 October 2026, runs three tournaments a day around a 500-sol Main Event with an announced guarantee of 100,000 soles. In Lima, Atlantic City in Miraflores is the historic room and runs the city's headline events — its Torneo Octubre in October 2026 was a 1,150-sol tournament with a 200,000-sol guarantee. The Circuito Dorado de Póker has also played Lima, with an announced guarantee of around USD 300,000 at Atlantic City in December 2025, though it has no edition scheduled at the time of writing.

Buy-ins are the thing to calibrate. A 500-sol Main Event is about USD 145 and a 1,000-sol high roller about USD 290 — serious money locally, modest against the international circuit. Peru is a good value destination for live poker rather than a high-stakes one.

Everything here is general information

We write what the statute and the regulator say, with the article numbers so you can check us. None of it is legal or tax advice, and the rules move: Ley 31557 is only four years old and its enforcement is visibly still being built out.