How Much Did Online Poker Markets Grow in 2025
2025 was a year of strong growth for online poker around the world. The total market size reached $6.27 billion across the year, which is 18% more than the $5.3 billion it was worth in 2023. That is a 9% growth rate per year, which would make the market worth around $10 billion by the end of the decade if it continues. And it shows no signs of slowing, with record numbers of players reported at the biggest poker sites several times throughout the year. But apart from growth in playerbase and spend, what else is set to change in poker throughout 2026?
How Does The Momentum Look Like
Well, most of these changes and trends that occurred in 2025 will be seen through the lens of this huge growth. Online poker is most definitely on an upswing. Even if that brings some challenges, it also means bigger and better things for players in almost every way. New markets to widen the playerbase. Bigger tournaments, prizes and rewards. New formats and game types. New tools and platforms for improving and analyzing gameplay. There’s a lot to discuss – this, is what you need to know about the emerging and ongoing trends in online poker in 2026.
New Markets and Operators Open, While the Giants Consolidate
Part of this huge growth in online poker is the opening up of new ways to play. Social poker sites. Sweepstakes poker rooms. Cryptocurrency poker rooms. There are currently more operators and players than at anytime since before Poker’s Black Friday in 2011.
The World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour both announced new social or sweepstakes based poker rooms targeting mostly North American customers, which also contributed to growth.
The Asia Pacific region and Latin America were newer markets that have seen a boom in poker in recent years, but the trend has been global. North America continued to dominate accounting for around $1.4 billion of the global $6 billion total.
In the US, Maine joined the regulated online poker market and there were various discussions around expanding interstate player pools. Some of those states have been beset by slow growth, or none at all, as by geofencing competition to only within state borders means player pools are severely limited.
Nevertheless, throughout the year, the biggest online poker room in terms of playerbase – GGPoker – consistently reported record numbers of players. It peaked at 600,000 players online at one time during in September.
Considering at one time people thought PokerStars previous record of 300,000 concurrent players from 2009 would never be beat again, the new record is even more impressive. It also shows that new poker rooms can come in and shake up the business with innovations and good marketing, as Stars was the dominant online poker room for many years.
Given all this, you should keep an eye on multiple sources when deciding where to play in your region. Besides reading our reviews, we recommend to check a few reputable sites in addition to cross-check information.
For example, finding the best online poker sites in Canada can be a challenge. There are lots of rooms that allow Canadians, and they all have advantages and disadvantages. Sure, bigger is often better – but not always. Bigger may also mean more sharks, and less incentive for generous rewards. In short: You should make sure you check reviews and comparative lists from Canada experts like Daisy Harrison of Casino.org for the latest and most up to date info that you need before picking an online poker room in Canada. The same principle applies for all geographies.
Online Tournaments are Only Getting Bigger and More Popular
The 2025 WSOP Online had a total prize pool of $28 million and over a million players entered at least one tournament over the six week marathon event. Other big online events had $10 million prize pools across dozens of tournaments, throughout the year.
As well bigger prize pools one big trend of 2025 was the mass return of online satellites to live poker events. Expect that to continue in 2026. Although they have been around for decades (Chris Moneymaker, who?) the slow decline of online poker for most of the 2010s, followed by the pandemic, meant the popularity of these tourneys fell off a little as online poker and live poker diverged even further,
However, not that online poker is booming again – live poker is back on board. Online qualifiers for the Irish Poker Open nearly doubled in size on PokerStars, Party Poker expanded its online into live qualification program by thousands of spaces and GGPoker qualified dozens of people for the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas and the Bahamas in 2025.
One catalyst for this re-emergence was GG buying up the WSOP brand from Caesars Entertainment in 2024, which made many poker rooms look back at their previous successes in integrating live and online markets.
New Advancements in AI Mean Better Solvers and Analytics Tools
Solvers have been around for a while now, which show the mathematically, game theory-approved optimal approach for any hand, table or board setup. However, they can be intimidating and there’s a lot of data to track and learn. Plus, GTO assumes that all players are using a similarly high level strategy. Which is far from true in the low stakes the majority of players are at.
The bigger innovation for most players, arguably, are AI tools that can organize that data, analyze it and turn it into practical tips for crushing at the tables when you have nothing but your brains. AI poker tools can currently help with:
- Hand history analysis
- Opponent profiling
- Session and volume tracking
- Mental game indicators
- Range construction and balancing
- Further study prioritisation
Bots can even play online poker for you, although needless to say in a real money platform this will get you banned. And detection algorithms are getting better as fast as the bots are. In fact, this kind of AI-powered analysis is even better for detecting cheaters than it is improving human poker play.
Because bots are getting better. They can now reliably win heads up 1v1 cash games against even poker professionals (in limited environments). With more players it becomes more complicated, with bots as yet unable to reliably beat professionals over the variance of six-player formats.
People have even worked out how to create a specific poker-advising large language model, that can reportedly advise on hands and discuss strategy at a professional level. One company even trained an LLM specifically for three person online Spin & Go, a format which has rapidly become one of the most popular over the past decade.
However, this is one area in which the market does have to be careful. Poker rooms only make a lot of money if losing players (fish) win often enough to keep them interested in playing while not getting beat so bad they end up quitting.
Otherwise a poker room’s player base dwindles down a small group of hardcore grinders who all know each other and their playstyles. Meaning new, casual poker players are even more squeezed out.
If the standard of play becomes so high, or people become so suspicious of bots and AI, the game runs the risk of turning off new recreational players. On the other hand, there are ways to adapt the game of poker for new players…
Regulation and Player Demand will Continue to Shape Platforms
One of the bigger trends for poker rooms is faster, higher variance games that are more quick gambling than an eight-hour tournament. The market is growing for the latter, but there will always be people who are interested in a quick thrill.
Expect even more Hyper-Turbo, Rush and Cash and short deck variant games and formats to be rolled out across different online poker rooms as the year goes out.
Although the market growth will be the biggest trend of 2026, there will be innovations in tech and new regulatory changes that can have a big impact on that story.
The biggest regulatory change would be opening up more of the US to online poker, or at least sharing player pools between states. Currently two states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, have the legal right to launch online poker but no operator has bothered because of the limited player pool and therefore demand.
If the US legalized online poker in more states, or just let them all play together online, the business would undoubtedly boom like never before. But, the chances of that happening are not likely anytime soon.
Nevertheless, expect the global online poker boom to continue for at least a few years yet – with 10% growth in market size per year forecast for at least the next five years.
