NoIQ Poker Company History

NoIQ Poker was birthed in January 2006, at which time their presence was limited to a simple “online poker coming soon” messaged website. It’s doubtful anyone landing on the initial website would have paid much attention to NoIQ Poker, but behind the scenes there was a team hard at work, determined to become the next major online poker brand.

In November 2006, NoIQ Poker was in full gear offering real money games on the fast growing iPoker Network. As a new online poker room, entering the market during what many were predicting would be the online poker boom’s decline, catching a break or two seemed like near requirements for success. Shortly after their launch they got this break when a change in United States law sent shockwaves through the online poker industry.

This change in US law affected not only North American residents and gambling operators, but also players and businesses from all areas, as there were all sorts of mergers, poker room closings, network changes, and payment delays. While other online poker companies were working to adapt, change business models, sell - or whatever else, there stood NoIQ Poker, a brand new site with a now well brewed vision anticipating their successful place in the online poker market.

As the story goes, NoIQ Poker translated their website into many languages, worked aggressively to build players trust, spent small fortunes on marketing in less than two years time, and became one of Europe’s largest online poker sites. While it sounds too simple to be true, the key to NoIQ Poker’s success was focusing on all of the basics. NoIQ looked at everything players desired and gave it to them on a grand scale. In December 2008, it was reported that NoIQ Poker had become one of Europe’s leading brands with over 10,000 active players each month.

NoIQ Poker’s fast growth a problem

The success of NoIQ Poker did not come without major hurdles and challenges. In fact their poker site was doing so well that they began giving away comps (bonus, cashback, fpp races, etc) to the size no iPoker room had attempted before. While it might seem illogical that iPoker would have a problem with an operator contributing so much to player retention, the problem came when other iPoker networked sites began to complain.

The iPoker Network in an attempt to protect the business model of their long standing operators, made several rule changes which collared the amounts and methods of comps NoIQ could give back to players. While NoIQ played mostly by the rules, there were more and more restrictions and rule changes imposed as NoIQ continued to remain high stake, high volume and the winning player’s site of choice. An example of one of the more predatory rules was a network imposed penalty if any sites gave out more in withdrawals than their players earned the network. This of course was a problem because NoIQ was the iPoker site of choice for many winning players.

In what we’ll refer to as a mutual split, NoIQ Poker left the iPoker Network and joined the Entraction Network. This move was announced on Christmas Day of 2008, and one week later the network change was complete. In joining Entraction NoIQ is now networked with over one-hundred small online poker brands as well as some big ones including Pinnacle Poker, 24hPoker, Devilfish, VC and others; but what is most important, they are now free to service players as they choose, without unreasonable network interference.