Georgia’s Adjarabet Riding High In Global Poker Traffic Rankings

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Friday, November 7th, 2014 | Written by Charles Washington

Whilst the PokerScout’s ‘Online Poker Traffic Report’ is used to operators such as PokerStars, 888poker, and iPoker dominating its rankings, recently a lesser known gambling operator from the Republic of Georgia called Adjarabet, has crept into the upper echelons of global cash game traffic. Within the past few weeks, Adjarabet even overtook the iPoker Network to move into third place overall, but has since slipped back to 4th with an average of 1,800 cash game players over a 7-day period.

Adjarabet only started appearing on PokerScout‘s traffic ranking 13 months ago, but now the Georgian poker room’s impressive performance has put it above operators such as PartyPoker, Full Tilt, and Bodog respectively, with much of its recent surge in popularity due to a highly successful five-week promotion which has seen the site’s traffic increase by 41% during the first week, alone.

A Little Background On Adjarabet

Adjarabet is a privately owned company with an online poker and gambling website based in the Republic of Georgia, as well as owning other interests throughout the country, including hotels and casinos. The small country in which it operates has a population of just 4.5 million people, and is located between Western Asia and Eastern Europe, with its neighbors including Turkey, Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The site has been running since the year 2000 and first began as a sportsbook, before eventually adding casino games and online poker in 2011. As recently as this autumn, Adjarabet was ranked outside the top ten busiest poker site’s in the world, but the brand now finds itself near the top competing against the biggest companies in online poker.

Enticing PokerMaster Promotion

Adjarabet’s ‘PokerMasters’ promotion offers players an opportunity to win a share of roughly $314,000 by earning points and moving up a weekly leader-board, with additional prizes for those players appearing on a final leader-board encompassing all five weeks of the promotion. Each weekly leader-board boasts a pool of roughly $48,500, with around $8,500 going to the first place finisher, while the final leader-board boasts a pool of $71,000, with $14,000 going to the eventual winner.

Players subsequently climb the leader-board by completing 14 tasks for which they are then awarded points depending on the difficulty of the task. These include winning or splitting “any raked hand from the small blind” to being “dealt pocket pairs over four consecutive raked hands on the same table.”

Also adding to the the ‘PokerMasters’ promotion’s huge popularity is that while regulars can increase their odds of success by multi-tabling, the tasks themselves are not weighted to favor the site’s high stakes players. With such a promotion tailor made to appeal to recreational players, it is no wonder that Adjarabet’s numbers are currently soaring.

Rising Popularity With International Players

The Georgian poker room’s low profile over the last few years has lead to the misconception that Adjarabet only accepted Georgian players. However, Adjarabet accepts players from all around the globe, with the exception of the United States. As mentioned on cardschat.com:

“While the Adjarabet Poker 3D brand is well-known in Georgia, it is also becoming popular among players from the Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and around the world, thanks to a succession of promos that have helped put the brand on the radar of international cash game enthusiasts.”

The operator seems to have kept its marketing efforts local until recently as it tried to resolve some security and fraud problems after introducing Skrill as a payment processor.

Tackling Collusion And Cheating

Adjarabet has devoted a great deal of time and resources to tackling collusion and cheating at his poker tables. Although certain criminals will always attempt to collude and gain an unfair advantage over players, the problem has been taken more seriously since Alastair Ives became the Adjarabet Head of Poker. As Ives’ explained to Pokerfuse earlier this year:

“When I first started here I had to introduce the idea that collusion was cheating. It was culturally normal..now we have a team of four devoted solely to investigating collusion.”

Anyone found breaching conduct rules can now expect to have their accounts seized, and their funds distributed to any affected players. Alastair Ives further adds that the new IT system currently in place further enhances the site’s capability to identify guilty players.