The online gambling industry has become a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. One of the biggest games within the online casino industry, in particular, is poker. It is one of the most popular card games you can play online, and it has professional players within its global remit who face off for big prize pots.
And it’s for this reason, as well as poker being a social game, that more people are learning how to play poker than ever before. And to see the revenue of a particular casino game rise so dramatically in 2020 does beg the question, What exactly could have changed this? Well, more and more poker websites are tailoring how people can access them and opening their doors to as many people as possible.
Mobile-friendly poker
What we mean by this, of course, is through smartphones. Although smartphone adoption was pretty dominant in countries such as the United States, Canada, and countries in the European Union, in other developing countries, such as India, to use a perfect example, a nation with an exploding population, A lot of people who may have been fans of poker previously might not have had the accessibility to play poker, particularly in person.
This could be due to not being able to get to a casino or not having a desktop/laptop. Whereas nearly everyone has a smartphone now, and a lot of the major online sites have now adapted their offerings so that they are mobile-friendly. With such a dominant area of the market shifting towards using their mobiles they were almost forced to pivot and adapt in order to stay relevant with the general public.
Ease of access
Although with such a sharp rise, we can’t attribute this solely to the fact poker websites have become more poker-friendly. And so why else has it grown so much? Well, technology also plays a part. A lot of people, depending on where they are in the world, may not always be able to access websites offering poker. Whereas now if they use a VPN, this makes their IP address, their digital identity, basically, meaning that they can now access and play poker online, whereas before they had no chance of doing this.
In addition to this, there are various different VPNs that they can choose from, meaning that the world of online poker opened its doors to millions more guests. Likewise, it also serves the dual benefit of protecting said users from the prying eyes of cyber criminals.
An array of payment methods
Likewise, if you wanted to play online poker, you would need a specific payment method. For example, a credit/debit card. And again, this wasn’t always possible. Likewise, the funds had to be in a certain currency. Well, thanks again to technology, this is no longer as wide a restriction. If you want to play poker online now, there are a plethora of different payments to choose from.
For example, you can use digital wallets such as PayPal or Skrill, or even pay by mobile or by cryptocurrency, depending on the website. This change was made again by most of the major online poker sites in order to try and present more of an open-door and accessible approach.
Clever marketing
Also, part of this growth in all credit falls to the marketing skills of the poker websites and online casinos. If you go to look and try to decide which site to play at, you can sometimes be spoilt for choice. And with the revenues growing so much, the industry has become more competitive than ever before. And so they have now had to become more innovative than ever before to try and get people to sign up.
Now you see more bonuses and promotions on offer than ever before. This in turn gives more people an incentive to sign up to an online poker site and start playing. And of course, the more people who are signing up and playing poker, the more revenue that particular site is going to generate, thus propelling the entire online poker industry.
In Summary
Hopefully, if you’ve not been aware of the sudden increase in popularity and revenue of online poker, or if you were wondering why there had been such a rise, hopefully, this has cleared it up for you today. You also have a lot of the bigger poker tournaments streamed online with people watching from all over the world, which in turn might encourage people to start learning about the game. All in all, it’s fair to say and to be admitted that there are many reasons as to why it has grown so much. It will be interesting to see however if this rate of growth can keep up as more and more people start to get into playing poker or whether it may stick as it is now or even start to decline. Only time will tell.
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