Adda52, India's Leading Online Poker Room: Five Questions for New CEO Naveen Goyal Adda52, India's Leading Online Poker Room: Five Questions for New CEO Naveen Goyal
Key Takeaways
  • CEO says the company will come to a decision about the TDS policy “in the next few weeks.”
  • Operator plans competitive online tournament series in the future.
  • “Traffic doubled” with Gayle marketing campaign.

India’s oldest and leading online poker room Adda52 recently saw a change in its leadership, appointing Naveen Goyal as the new CEO.

Under the new management, Adda52 proclaims that it will be more player-friendly and is working on various measures for the poker community.

The company recently launched its second brand campaign, “Banao dimag ko ameer.” In English, this translates to literally “Make Your Mind Rich” (the company says “increase your intelligence which is after all your true wealth” better conveys its true meaning.)

It features brand ambassador and international cricketing star Chris Gayle with the aim to promote poker as a game of skill. The marketing campaign appears to be in direct response to PokerStars India’s Nawaz campaign.

We intend to be more player-friendly and work towards “for the players, by the players.”

Adda52 says it has built up a database of over 2 million registered users in its eight-year history. The site spreads a mix of Texas Hold’em, Omaha and Crazy Pineapple games, and has even developed its own poker variant dubbed Hold’em++.

Delta Corp Ltd, India’s only gaming company listed on an Indian stock exchange, acquired the company that owns and operates the Adda52.com gaming portal. The poker site regularly organizes a live tournament series, the Deltin Poker Tournament (DPT), in the Indian states of Goa and Sikkim.

Adda52 is the exclusive partner of the World Poker Tour (WPT) brand in India, which recently took place at the Deltin Royale floating casino moored in Goa. Adda52 has been hosting the event since 2017.

Since the site’s launch in 2011, Adda52 has a near-unbroken record of holding the top spot in cash game traffic, usually by a comfortable margin, according to figures tracked by independent industry monitor GameIntel and available on the PRO Data platform (Adda52 does not endorse these figures). Today, it currently averages 420 concurrent cash game players, representing 35% of all tracked traffic in the country.

It has over 2.5 times more players than PokerStars India and 1.5 times more than The Spartan Poker, the second largest online poker room in the country.

PRO sat down with Naveen Goyal to talk about the company’s strategy and future plans.