UK Poker Scene Update

Online poker has had something of a dream run for the last fifteen years or so, during which time players have become mainstream celebrities and it seemed that everyone you met was playing the game in some form or another. The precise numbers are hard to ascertain, but it’s thought that around 4% of the UK adult population have at one time or another played online poker for real money, which equates to more than 2.5 million people.

With a player base of this size, it’s hard to imagine the future of the game being anything but rosy. But what’s interesting about the direction of online poker in the UK in the coming years is that two contrasting pictures seem to emerge. 

On the one hand, the 2016 annual report issued by the UK Gambling Commission [3] has demonstrated beyond doubt that the popularity of online gaming as a whole continues to grow significantly year upon year. 

Specific revenue figures for online poker in the UK are not provided in the report, but it does break down gambling revenues into sectors. What is noteworthy is that in the period April 2015 - March 2016, the gross gambling yield (GGY) from remote gambling was £4.468 billion out of a total of £13.6 billion (up from £11.3 billion in the preceding twelve months), making online gambling for the first time the dominant revenue generating sector.

Yet at the same time, there is a sense that the online poker boom has stalled, with the consensus in the industry being that there are fewer people playing online than there were a couple of years ago. Whether this is because of the software tools in poker rooms [4], like heads up displays (HUDs), seating scripts and bots are making recreational or novice players into easy pickings and  frightening them away from the tables, or because leading online poker rooms have been cutting rewards, raising entry fees for tournaments and increasing the rake to try and make up for lost revenues (affecting professional players), is hard to say with any certainty. 

What does, however, appear to be the case is that the previous dominance of some very well-established sites who were at the forefront on the online poker boom, such as Party Poker and Poker Stars, are now being matched for market share by newer names, such as the Sky Gaming Group [5], whose sites also offer a full range of casino games in addition to poker. An advantage that these sorts of sites have is that they offer greater gaming choice, as well as games played against the House rather than other more predatory players. This unsurprisingly has some appeal for the occasional player who isn’t sitting down to try to make a living, bur rather just to enjoy themselves. 

There are, however, changes being proposed to UK legislation covering online gambling which seek to standardize the measures gaming sites put in place to detect cheating and collusion, to prohibit the use of third party software like seating scripts, and to limit the display of poker hand histories. It is thought that these measures will go some way to levelling the playing field, and in so doing might entice those recreational players who have started to abandon the game away from the slots and casino games back to the online poker tables. 

Whether these changes will have the desired effect remains to be seen, but while the rest of the online gaming sector is growing rapidly, online poker rooms undoubtedly have some work to do to entice recreational players back if they are going to see a return to their heyday.