Poker in Poland: where you can actually play

Poland splits poker three ways. Online, casino gaming including poker against the house is reserved to a state monopoly held by Totalizator Sportowy and run as Total Casino; private operators cannot be licensed for it. In licensed land-based casinos, poker is legal — but the operators publish almost nothing about it. And the live poker most Polish players actually play happens somewhere else entirely: a nationwide league and freeroll circuit in pubs, billiard halls and restaurants across 26 cities.

Where the games are

The practical answer for a Polish player is the **Polish Poker Series** circuit. It runs league tournaments and freerolls most evenings across Białystok, Bielsko-Biała, Bydgoszcz, Bytom, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Katowice, Kielce, Koszalin, Kraków, Leszno, Lublin, Łódź, Nowy Sącz, Olsztyn, Ostrów Wielkopolski, Piła, Poznań, Rzeszów, Siedlce, Słupsk, Sopot, Szczecin, Toruń, Warsaw, Wrocław and Zielona Góra — usually starting between 18:00 and 19:00, with a published national ranking behind the league events.

As the schedule stood on 10 November 2026, the busiest rooms are Warsaw, which plays something almost every night of the week and is the only city whose league runs through Christmas; Łódź, which plays league nights twice a week; and Sopot, which has the circuit's most consistent paid event in its Friday deep stack. The season's finals — the events the circuit calls MASTERS — fall in Łódź just before Christmas and in Szczecin at the end of January. Our Poland tournaments pages carry the dates and start times for all of it.

Its buy-in festivals, though, are held at **Banco Casino Bratislava**, not in Poland. Four Polish Poker Series events with large guarantees were announced there for 2026. That split tells you most of what you need to know about the Polish market: the domestic circuit is league and freeroll play, and the events with real prize pools are a drive over the border.

What the casinos will tell you: nothing

Poland has licensed land-based casinos where poker is legal, and Casinos Poland is the largest chain — six venues, in Bielsko-Biała (Hotel Grępielnia), Katowice (Hotel Metropol), Łódź (CH Manufaktura), Warsaw (Hotel Presidential, the former Marriott), and two in Wrocław (Hotel Polonia, and Hotel Korona which opened recently on the Rynek).

We have deliberately not published venue pages for them. Their corporate site lists addresses and nothing else — no games, no stakes, no schedules, and the only mention of poker anywhere on it is a house-edge figure in the responsible-gambling section, which describes a banked table game rather than a card room. Olympic Casino's Polish domain now redirects to a corporate page with no Polish venues at all.

We would rather say that than publish six pages implying a poker room we cannot verify. If you want a casino game in Poland, phone the venue.

The legal position

The framework is the **Gambling Act of 19 November 2009**, substantially amended with effect from **1 April 2017**, supervised by the Ministry of Finance.

- **Online casino gaming, including poker against the house, is a Totalizator Sportowy monopoly**, operating as Total Casino. No private operator can be licensed for it. - Sports betting, bingo and promotional lotteries **are** licensable privately — which is why Poland has licensed sportsbooks but no licensed poker rooms. - A **register of prohibited gambling domains** is published at hazard.mf.gov.pl. Once a domain is entered, telecommunications providers must make it inaccessible and redirect visitors to a notice page within 48 hours, and payment providers must stop serving it within 30 days. Either failure carries a fine of up to 250,000 złoty. - **The law reaches the individual player, not only the operator.** The Ministry's own page on the register states that taking part in a game offered without the required permit carries a monetary penalty of 100% of the winnings net of stakes, and that participating in a foreign gambling game can carry a fine of up to 120 daily rates under the Penal Fiscal Code. We previously said we could not confirm this; having read the Ministry's page directly on 10 November 2026, we can. - Poker in licensed land-based casinos is legal. - The minimum age is **18**.

Why this page recommends no poker site

Every other market page here names a room we think you can use. This one does not, on purpose. International poker rooms cannot be licensed to serve Polish residents online, and the domain register and payment blocking exist to stop them. Pointing you at one would mean pointing you at a service your own country blocks — and, as the bullet above now makes explicit, one where the penalty is calculated on what you win.

Polish players

Poland's record is far stronger than its market. **Wiktor Malinowski** leads the all-time list with $13.68m and won $4,789,000 in a single Triton Montenegro event in 2024. **Dzmitry Urbanovich** took a WSOP bracelet in the $10,000 Eight-Game championship in 2026 — a mixed-game title, which is rare for anyone. **Dominik Panka** won the 2014 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event and was still finishing second in WSOP bracelet events this summer. And **Sebastian Malec** won EPT Barcelona in 2016 for $1,271,041 after qualifying through a small online satellite, at 22 years old.

Eleven Polish players have passed $1.4m in live earnings.

All legal points here are general information, not legal advice. We have not published a rate for any tax on winnings because we could not confirm one.