Romania joins the GGNetwork with new regulated online poker site

Jon Pill
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Posted on: November 30, 2021 8:27 am EST

GGN Europe Limited — the GGNetwork’s European arm — in partnership with Skywind Holdings Ltd, has launched a new Romanian-facing online poker client. The joint venture, under the name WindGG, launched playgg.ro today.

Hilary Stewart-Jones is the CEO of Skywind Holdings. In a press release, Stewart-Jones said, “We are delighted to partner with GGPoker. Skywind’s philosophy is local partnerships with a global scale and we are very excited and proud to be part of this Romanian initiative.”

The new site advertises most of the same features as the main GGPoker client. These include staking, a built-in HUD, and game variants like short deck and All in or Fold tourneys. Romanian players will be part of the GGPoker player pool as online poker is legal and regulated. And Romanian law does not require a player pool segregated from the international market.

WindGG operates the playgg.ro site under a licence issued by Romania’s National Gambling Office.

Under Romanian regulations, GGPoker does have to provide a certain level of localized service. This includes a Romanian-language website and customer service, and a set of customer protection features specific to Romanian regulations.

Tomorrow, the world

GGPoker feels so ubiquitous in the poker world now that it is hard to remember a couple of years ago when it was just one of several competing Asian-facing sites. Now it is the primary online partner of the WSOP and the main competition to PokerStars. It signed Daniel Negreanu in 2019, Dan Bilzerian in 2020, and Jason Koon in 2021. The company has become the biggest game in the majority of town.

Negreanu and Koon’s images both appear on the playgg.ro website. The assumption is that their contracts will include further publicity for the Romanian market. This is a gig that is practically Negreanu’s birthright. His parents moved to Canada from Romania seven years before he was born. They made sure that Daniel speaks the language fluently.

GGPoker is rapidly approaching the Alexandrian impasse — the point at which one runs out of worlds to conquer. For now, they’re still inveigling themselves into the regulated American markets and smaller European markets like the Netherlands.

Romania is part of this mopping-up process.

Marco Trucco who heads up GGPoker’s European division explained, “this is another important step in the expansion of GGPoker into regulated European markets. Romanian players now have access to the best poker software, the biggest tournaments and promotions in the industry.”

This is fighting talk. PokerStars have been in that market since 2016.

Featured image source: Flickr by Nicholas Raymond