Back in 2019, GGPoker was one of the middling competitors in the poker market. It was a specialist company serving primarily the East Asian markets through the GGPoker site and Natural8 (another skin on the GGNetwork). Now it is part of an industry duumvirate with PokerStars.
In fact, during July 2021, it overtooks Stars' traffic numbers. The two sites noew utterly dominate the worldwide poker market together.
2021 was a big year for poker in general. We saw the WSOP return to the RIO for the last time. We saw European poker rooms open up as vaccination programs started to show progress. Then we saw them shut down again as Omicron began to spread. We saw records break in both in the quantity of attendance and in its duration, with Zack Gensler attempting to break Phil Laak's record for the longest poker session.
With 2021 coming to a close, GGPoker's publicity team rounded up the key milestones that the company passed during the last twelve months.
"2021 WRAPPED UP," the @GGPoker account tweeted along with an infographic summarising the data. "Huge THANK YOU to all the players. Every single one of you played a part in reaching these milestones. 2022 HERE WE COME."
2021 in the rear view
Key among the stats are those relating to GGPoker's lucrative partnership with the WSOP. The graphic lists the 21 bracelets and 18 rings doled out for victories on GGPoker. Though this does not appear to include the 33 bracelets GGPoker handed out as part of the WSOP Online in August/September 2021. The 18 rings were awarded for the WSOPC Online events that GGPoker ran in May 2021.
The WSOP played its part in GGPoker hitting $2.3 billion in tournament payouts. Though the mean of that number — $1.52 billion — came just from their daily tournaments rather than big series.
The company also claims to have made 277 players into millionaires with one player having accrued $8.4 million in tournament cashes of the year. The biggest single tournament prize was $2.5 million.
Overall the digital dealers in GGPoker's server bank dealt 1.98 billion hands to GGPoker's players. One of these 1.98 billion hands was awarded that largest cash game pot.
That cash game pot was $706k in size and occurred during a $500/$1,000 pot-limit Omaha game. The hand was rather smaller than GGPoker's 2020 record of $974k.
There were some other milestones that GGPoker did not mention in its bumf. For example, no mention is made of the company's very public spat with Vanessa Kade.
Then again they didn't mention that GGPoker overtook PokerStars for a bit there in July, so it all evens out in the end.
Featured image source: GGPoker
