GGPoker takes over the market leader position from PokerStars after a 15 year-hegemony.
Since the mid-2000’s the market-leading online poker room was PokerStars as it overtook PartyPoker as the world’s largest online poker room after the U.S. Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA). Due to such Act many sites, including PartyPoker, promptly suspended business with U.S. gamblers, while others, such as PokerStars, did not.
At that time, the main competitor of PokerStars for the No.1 position was FullTilt up until 2011. The infamous Black Friday – where among others PokerStars and FullTilt both were indicted by the US federal authority with the violation of the UIGEA – caused FullTilt to eventually shut down with PokerStars remaining the leading online poker platform.
GGPoker – the rising star
GGPoker was established back in 2014. At its early years, it was active in the Asian region mostly but expanded globally and became a global market player in a few years.
GGPoker was growing steadily until 2020 when it potentially became the biggest competitor of PokerStars. It is obvious that Covid19 has many drawbacks however, in the case of online poker, the corona virus has shown advantages and GGPoker was able to gain this advantage of the people being locked for months at home in front of their laptops and tablets. During the first half of 2021 GGPoker gradually closed the gap between the No.1 spot and now GGPoker became the market leader in cash game traffic according to the data of GameIntel.
The rising of GGPoker in such a short period of time may be due to the fact that probably GGPoker has the most innovative software that has been seen recently. It offers wide range of features like Snapcam, cash drops, in-client staking, insurance, Flip & Go, Battle Royal and many more.
Another reason for their success may be that GGPoker is not afraid to take some risk. Being relatively young in the business but they had the chance to have the first ever online WSOP which turned out a massive success for them.
It will be really interesting and we’re looking forward to see how the race between GGPoker and PokerStars in the future will look like.
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