When PokerStars does something, the online poker industry sits up and takes notice. Such has been the case with Zoom Poker, the new fast paced poker variety that the world’s largest online poker room introduced late last week. According to cash game traffic tracking site PokerScout.com, the other poker rooms and networks have taken notice of PokerStars pulling customers away from its competitors.
Let us first take a moment to review. Zoom Poker fills the void that was created when Full Tilt Poker went under, taking its extremely popular Rush Poker along with it. With Zoom Poker, players can skip all that annoying downtime after folding hands and just play hand after hand after hand after hand. Players who want to jump into a Zoom Poker game don’t search for a table with an open seat. Instead, they sign-up for a specific game and stakes and the poker software inserts them into the player pool. The players are then plunked down at a random table filled with random players. The hand then proceeds as usual. As soon as a player’s hand is over, however, whether that be from a fold or a showdown, the player is yanked away from the table and inserted into another with an entirely new set of opponents. Players don’t even need to wait for action to get around to them to move on to the next hand; by clicking the “fast fold” button, players can sneak off to the next table while the software waits until it is their turn to actually show the rest of the table the fold.
Enter PokerScout’s Weekly Online Poker Traffic Update. According to the site, nine of the top ten online poker rooms and networks saw their cash game traffic drop (3.5 percent decrease for the industry as a whole), while six of the ten were hit by a 5 percent or greater decrease. PokerStars was one of the “winners” for the week, only seeing its cash game traffic dip 1.1 percent. The attraction of Zoom Poker was certainly the primary factor in PokerStars’ relative success for the week.
But wait, there’s more. By PokerScout’s count, 25 percent of all cash game players at PokerStars have been playing Zoom Poker. But because Zoom Poker hands are close to three times as fast as regular online poker hands, almost half the cash game hands on the site are taking place at Zoom Poker tables. PokerScout then figures, logically, that since Zoom Poker hands are three times as fast as regular hands, one Zoom Poker player equals three players from the standard tables. As such, PokerStars cash game traffic wasn’t really down 1.1 percent last week. It is actually up nearly 50 percent since Zoom Poker was launched. This virtual gain in cash game players would thus explain, in PokerScout’s estimation, the loss of players at other poker room and networks.
Because we are still less than a year removed from Black Friday, the industry-wide numbers still look bad when compared to the same time period last year. Year-over-year, online poker cash game traffic is down 32 percent.
