Founded 2011, PokerFest pioneered the concept of large poker festivals in Romania and it has since grown into the most active and dynamic poker festivals organizer in East Europe and Balkans. During it’s over 5 years of uninterrupted activity, the company has organized over 40 events across 9 cities and 5 countries.
During these more than 5 years, PokerFest has created a rich environment for the Romanian players and a steadily developing live poker community. The players’ participation has grown from dozens to thousands per festival and players from more and more countries took the opportunity to join PokerFest’s events, reaching over 20 nationalities in some of 2016 events.
The company’s reach and scope were boosted even more in 2015 when Romania passed a friendly gambling legislation which has allowed the major international online operators to legally provide their services to the Romanian players. Since then, major actors in the industry have taken the opportunity to promote their products in Romania through live poker events, and their choice was natural: PokerFest’s history and portfolio was being the best recommendation, and its current festivals were flawlessly running around the year. As a result, the PokerFest brand has been standing, since 2015, during even larger events, next to those of PokerStars, 888poker, NetBet, Winmasters and Unibet.
Under PokerFest partnerships, PokerStars took the opportunity to extend its Eureka Poker Tour brand in Romania (May 2015), 888poker followed in June 2016 with a 888live Local festival on the Romanian seaside, followed closely by NetBet with its first NetBet Open event in July 2016. Then, in December, the Romanian community witnessed all the prize-pool records shattered by the 500k € Gtd Unibet Open Main Event, a freezeout tournament with a final prize-pool of €584,910. The participation record had been set one year earlier: the Winmasters Poker Open Main Event had a staggering 1,060 €550 entries in december 2015.
All these highly exigent international partners have given excellent feedback to their collaboration with PokerFest, as their Romanian partner has proved to being operating at the highest international standards in the live poker industry.
Aside the great international festivals held in partnership with the online operators, PokerFest has a rich schedule of its own national events: the PokerFest branded festivals and also the latest addition, the Romanian Poker Series. RPS has been recently re-branded as URPS, i.e. Unibet Romanian Poker Series and will feature several stages during the current year.
2017 will be another fully scheduled year for PokerFest, with plenty of international partnerships. During January-February there has been running the first Unibet Romanian Poker Series festival, during March-April there will be an Israel Poker Championship event in Bucharest and in May there will be held the first Romanian stage of the newly launched PokerStars Festivals brand (formerly known as Eureka Poker Tour).
PokerFest ongoing success is owed mainly to its firm and dynamic management, its highly trained personnel and its state of the art technical infrastructure.
The company CEO is Sorin Constantinescu, a casino expert with a live-long history in the industry. He is currently the President of the Romanian Casinos Association and his love for poker stems in 2010, when he organized a successful World Poker Tour stage in Bucharest as a casino manager and owner. From then on, he never looked back and wholeheartedly approached the vibrant world of live poker as an operator and market developer.
PokerFest’s Tournament Manager, Alex Cretu is a highly active and minutious card-room manager, inspiring his staff with his enthusiasm and attention to details. He has been working along prestigious tournament directors and he strictly follows the rules set by the international regulator, Poker Tournament Directors Association.
As for the technical side, PokerFest has implemented and developed the very most advanced live poker software in existence, the Let’s Poker platform. The application allows a real time update of any poker game – from a regular poker club cash game to the largest poker festival. The users of this software can check on a minute by minute basis all the changes in stakes, blinds, stack sizes, players in – all over the locations managed by Let’s Poker, with the least amount of human intervention.
Las but not least, PokerFest stands in the center of a large social media poker network. Its events are heavily promoted via its website www.pokerfest.ro, on its popular Facebook page and over all its media outlet partners.
