FEATURES
POKERMATCH
THE MODERN POKER PLAYER The resurgence of poker is steadily on the horizon as Covid-19 restrictions ease. Can this year compete with the boom of the 2000s? Gambling Insider speaks with PokerMatch CEO Ruslan Bangert, on how best to attract the “modern player”
The worldwide lockdown and ongoing global pandemic saw thousands of people take to online gaming and poker (due to enforced stay-at-home measures). How has the influx of new users aided in the resurgence of poker and its online development in Ukraine? The end of April 2020 was a record-breaking time for the online poker industry. The previous time when similar figures for the number of online players were observed was as far back as 2014, when the market capacity was 2.5 times higher than now, in August 2021. For PokerMatch, April 2020 was also a record-breaking month in many aspects. We clearly understood that we needed to provide an exciting interactive experience for the people who stayed home, and we did it by offering unusual promotions, bonus offers,
78
GAMBLINGINSIDER.COM
and our humanity and empathy for our users. Now we see that many of those who came to us during lockdown are still in the game. That helped us to develop in Ukraine as well, but we realise that now people also need to relax after a long time at home and in online games, and we remind our players more often to take breaks. Do you think the new surge in poker this year could even equate to how huge the online poker boom was back in the 2000s? You can compare it to the boom of 2003–2006 and to one in Eastern Europe in 2008. But only in terms of quantity, not quality. The interest in poker in general and online poker (in particular), was due to the victories of charismatic players in live tournaments that were shown on TV. So the reasons for
the interest were very positive and vivid, people were interested in something new. The 2020 boom is a little bit different; as an industry, we were supposed to be happy, but I would have preferred that any interest in our beloved game was spurred not by pandemics and restrictions on humanity. Instead, the same bright victories by ordinary people like it was in the early 2000s. Back in the 1990s, poker was largely televised, which increased its popularity. Given the restrictions on gambling advertising nowadays, do you think this will curtail the growth of poker? Or is the growth of mobile more effective in increasing people’s interest? Nowadays, television no longer plays such an important role in brand promotion as it
