Explore Belarus Poker: Laws, Events, and Venues

Belarus was part of the Soviet Union for much of the 20th Century. Thus the Communist regime completely suppressed gambling for decades. The Soviet rule started to soften in the 1980’s, that’s when the first land casinos started popping up in the USSR, mainly Russia.

Belarus became independent from the Soviet Union in August 1991. In October the same year, the Belarussian Council of Ministers created the first gambling legislation. That is very quick for a newly independent country – many former Soviet nations waited many years to introduce their first pieces of gambling legislation.

With online gambling, however, it took much, much longer. According to an article on CalvinAyre.com, the head of the government’s Ministry of Taxes and Levies drafted legislation in July 2018 in which they set up a licencing scheme for foreign online gambling site operators. In that draft, he also proposed they’d raise the legal gambling age from 18 to 21. The first Belarussian online casino licenses were given out in April 2019.

In 2009, Belarus’ superpower neighbor, Russia decided to restrict games of chance in their country to only 4 designated “gambling zones”. This pushed a lot of traffic to Belarussian casinos and poker rooms, as due to the large distances in their homeland, many Russian gamblers decided to travel across the Belarussian border instead in search of some action.

Famous Belarussian Poker Players

Mikita “fish2013” Badziakouski is one of the world’s most successful high rollers in our time. He has cashed for over $29 million in live tournaments which puts him in the top 15 biggest live tournament winners of all time.

He’s a regular in the Triton high roller series’ super high buy-in events, of which he won three. In July 2018, he won the HK$2 million Triton Main Event in Jeju, South Korea. He got $5.257 million for that victory – that is the biggest live tournament cash of his career to date.

Badziakouski started off as an online player, playing under his iconic screen name “fish2013” on PokerStars. There, he played high stakes NLHE cash games and tournaments.

Needless to say, he tops the Belarussian all time money list on Hendon. Second on that list is Ihar Soika with $3.488 million. His biggest score on the live felt is from August 2014, when he won the €10,000 NLHE High Roller 8-max event at EPT Barcelona for €747,200. In 2017, he came very close to winning a WSOP bracelet – he had a runner-up finish for $675,995 in the $1,500 NLHE Monster Stack event.