The seven most significant events to take place in the world of online poker in 2022

We shall all be saying our last farewells to the year 2022 very shortly. Over the course of the last year, the poker business has seen a number of significant changes. The repercussions of these changes will, for a number of years to come, determine how many players and rooms live their lives. In this post, we highlight seven of the most significant happenings that have occurred during the year.

The departure of guests from Russian Federation.

Records for the number of people attending live series.

PokerMatch has been reinstated on iPoker.com.

The proliferation of online “Mystery Bounty” competitions in recent years.

Illustration of the biggest pot in the history of the world.

PokerKing has finally released their mobile app.

PLO5 boom.

The room may be accessed from Russia.

The cessation of operations in Russia by a number of leading online poker rooms at the same time at the end of February 2022 as a direct result of Russia’s accession to the international sanctions can unequivocally be referred to as the most important event of the year in online poker.

And not only for the Russians, but the “movement” around a market of this scale led to a reformatting of the traffic distribution throughout the whole sector of the business.

PokerStars, partypoker, 888poker, Guts, William Hill, Netbet, Bet365, KKpoker, and PokerMatch are among the online poker sites that have pulled out of the Russian market this year. As a result, the total number of games offered at these sites has decreased.

It is abundantly evident that the vast majority of Russian poker players started looking for other sites, which resulted in their rankings in the global ranking improving:

Pokerdom.

PokerOK, although having officially left GGNetwork, continued to be a member of its prize pool.

Winning and Chico are two American television networks.

The most popular poker programs are known as PPPoker and PokerBros.

The inclusion of Skrill and Neteller on the list of sanctioned entities effectively concluded the migration of Russians to cryptocurrency and restricted their options to just include those sites that are compatible with those payment processors.

Records for live series’ audience turnout

Many industry professionals anticipated that offline tournaments will pick up again after the fall of covid competitions. The most hopeful among them even projected that tournament attendance would recover to the heights it had reached before the outbreak, but what really occurred beyond all of their hopes.

During the year 2022, the following tournaments and series all set new attendance records:

WSOP tournaments as a whole brought in more than $330 million, which is $50 million more than they did three years ago. The Main Event saw the second-highest number of participants in the annals of the festival, with 8,633 people signing up to compete.

WPT – The World Championship Main Event in December attracted 2,960 players and offered a prize pool of $29,080,000, which is about twice the amount that was offered for an event that broke a record in 2007.

The European Poker Tour’s Barcelona Main Event of the Summer Series attracted 2,294 participants for the first time in the history of the brand, which resulted in both players paying out more than one million euros to finish in first and second place, respectively.

RPT – all July series events in Armenia gathered more than $500,000 in prize money, with the Main Event contributing $129,228 of that total for the very first time.

Naturally, one of the factors that contributed to such a level of success was the proliferation of internet satellites, the number of which also grew.

Although this impact may be somewhat explained by the fact that players simply “missed” live poker and that only the biggest and most well-known brands set records, one cannot help but be ecstatic about the fact that the industry is expanding at such a rapid rate.

PokerMatch is now available again via iPoker.

iPoker has maintained its expansion this year after being the world’s second biggest poker network in terms of the number of games it offers in the previous year. They have approximately 3,000 connections in the cache on a daily basis, which has propelled them to the third spot in the PokerScout list. The most important driver of expansion has been the tried-and-true method of expanding via the purchase of other brand names.

The gamers from the Ukrainian poker room PokerMatch officially “joined” the iPoker pool on November 15.

The most fascinating aspect of this merger is the fact that it was largely responsible for the birth of the Speed Poker format, which had previously had a rather low level of popularity among the network’s users. The overall number of connections grew by a factor of two to three, and simultaneously, the NL10€ and NL20€ limitations went into effect.

Other significant new features of the network that are worth highlighting are as follows:

The limit grid has been expanded in Cache (now going up to NL/PLO5K€), Spins (now offering 200€ tournaments), and Fast Poker (now going up to NL100€).

other booming poker series, including three large ones with six-figure prizes, one of which being the all-time record iPoker IPF Winter €5,000,000 GTD, as well as other lesser weekend festivals.

By the way, and the Italian branch of the network in the previous year came in first in the nation in terms of pool size for the very first time in the history of the country, surpassing Starz.

The proliferation of online “Mystery Bounty” competitions in recent years

The gamers from the Ukrainian poker room PokerMatch officially “joined” the iPoker pool on November 15.

Other significant new features of the network that are worth highlighting are as follows:

The limit grid has been expanded in Cache (now going up to NL/PLO5K€), Spins (now offering 200€ tournaments), and Fast Poker (now going up to NL100€).

other booming poker series, including three large ones with six-figure prizes, one of which being the all-time record iPoker IPF Winter €5,000,000 GTD, as well as other lesser weekend festivals.

By the way, and the Italian branch of the network in the previous year came in first in the nation in terms of pool size for the very first time in the history of the country, surpassing Starz.

The proliferation of online “Mystery Bounty” competitions in recent years

This year, the unexpected face of the biggest room offering a game based on cryptocurrencies, Coin Poker, presented itself to the public.

On February 13, players at the PLO $5K/$10K table contributed to a pot that eventually reached $7,750,652 in USDT.

Tony G was the primary offender responsible for the presence of such pricey activity in a room that was rated third in the world. It was largely due to his efforts that players, most of whom were Tony’s friends, started to arrive at the tables in the Coin Poker lobby that had such high stakes.

Even if such high-stakes conflicts only took place in the room for a brief period of time, the “stir” produced around them in the poker press had a good influence on the popularity of Coin Poker. This led to an increase in the number of people playing Coin Poker. At this point, the PLO $50/$100 game is likely to be the most costly game in it.

PokerKing’s introduction of a mobile client was just completed.

Only three of the seven improvements that were intended for this year by the makers of the WPN roums software – the biggest of the host Americans – have been completely realized. These three changes include the animation of thrown goods at the tables, deals at the finals, and the debut of AoF.

Winning skins were the only ones that included a downloaded mobile client, and it was only available in December.

Over a period of two years, this program was in the process of being developed. Play may only take place at a single table, and the only games offered are standard Hold’em and Omaha cache tables. It is anticipated that every additional capabilities will “finish” in the year 2023.

Only on the WPN network was it possible, up until very recently, to play on mobile devices using a browser while using Fast Poker and Spins. The availability of a current client for mobile devices has become an absolute need for all of the TOP poker rooms. Its primary purpose is to entice and maintain the participation of amateur players.

The 5-Card Omaha Boom

It has been said for several years that Omaha will grow in popularity compared to Hold’em. One aspect of this process has been the expansion of the range of PLO types in room clients.

Quite unexpectedly, 5-card Omaha became the main “engine” for the promotion of this type of poker in 2022.

PLO5 tables appeared in Winning and Chico roums and also took a significant part of the traffic in mobile roums (PPPoker, PokerBros and ClubGG).

This is due not only to the less developed strategy for this format and “density” of regulators, but also to the level of action, which gives the game with five pocket cards to poker fans.

It is quite possible that in 2023 we can expect a PLO6 boom.

Of course, the list of even the biggest news in online poker is not exhausted by the list given to us.

For example, we did not mention:

About the crisis of the cryptocurrency market, caused by the closure of several major projects, first of all – the exchange FTX, and the fall of Bitcoin. And in fact, many rooms and thousands of players’ bankrolls depend on crypto right now.

About the opening of a new room from a well-known brand – WPT Global, and the announcement of the start of another room – 4Poker, which is being created by the former managers of Starz and Brynx.

Online poker remains a fast-changing industry, which means that next year it will bring us many new things, and we hope that among these novelties will prevail positive ones. Happy New Year 2023!