France’s long-suffering online poker market will get no help from the outside world after politicians rejected sharing liquidity with other European countries.

Despite pleas from local gambling regulator ARJEL, the French National Assembly declined to approve gambling law amendments that would have allowed French-licensed online poker operators to share liquidity with licensed operators in other European Union regulated markets.

This is the second time that legislators have scuttled ARJEL’s attempts to shore up the regulated online poker market. In 2013, French legislators justified their rejection by musing that online poker’s decline was a global phenomenon resulting from poker falling “out of fashion” and so there was little point taking steps to prop up this corpse.

Hopes were slightly higher this time around after Emmanuel Macron, minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry, said he was willing to work with ARJEL to craft a proposal that legislators would find acceptable, but it appears this particular Gordian knot is a right bitch to untie.