International Game Technology is a leader in social casino gaming. To maintain its standing, the company is always on the up and up with trends in the social gambling market. Recently, IGT has found that more than 30% of all poker players at social casinos are women, marking a new trend in the industry.
Poker is thought of as an activity that is dominated by male players, while women are generally associated with games like bingo and pokies. However, a shift is occurring, as more and more women are playing poker on social casino apps like Zynga Poker and other play-money poker games. When it comes to playing poker online at social casinos, women spend almost as much time as men do playing the game.
The states in which women spend the most time playing is Hawaii, where women spend 6.5 hours a month on social poker games. Utah sees the most virtual spending, as women spend 8 million chips in the average online session.
“As the world’s largest virtual casino, we pay attention to trends and make note of the fact that poker is appealing to broader audiences both online and on the casino floor,” says John Clelland, Vice President of IGT’s Global Marketing Division. “Poker is traditionally thought of as a male-dominated game but our data proves that female poker players are on the rise in social casinos.”
This is an important trend to notice, as it is likely that it will carry over into real-money online and land-based casino gambling. The original poker boom was caused by the introduction of online poker, which caused an influx of poker players in the land-based market. Now, we could see a similar shift occur due to the fact that more women are playing poker in social casinos online.
IGT’s Social Casino Index is a project that monitors activity at social gambling sites operated by IGT. Detailed data is collected by the index and analyses the behaviour of more than 6 million players.
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