According to PokerScout’s Weekly Online Poker Traffic Update, online poker cash game traffic fell the slightest of amounts last week, declining just one-tenth of one percent. It was still a loss, though, marking the fourth consecutive week that internet poker counts have fallen.
On the bright side, though (aside from it being a nearly break-even week), seven of the industry’s top ten poker sites and networks showed an increase in traffic and it appears, or so says PokerScout, that it was Adjarabet that really did the damage last week. The poker room based in the Republic of Georgia feel from ninth in PokerScout’s rankings to eleventh, likely because its more than three month-long Magic Hand promotion finally ended. As much as I have praised Adjarabet for its ability to attract players to what was once a fairly anonymous website, it does seem like the site is a bit gimmicky, relying on promotions to maintain its cash game traffic. It has been able to keep some of that traffic after the promotions end – after all, it has only dropped two spots in the rankings – but now that there is not a particularly attractive promo going on, the players are leaving.
PokerScout notes in its report that bitcoin poker site SwCpoker.eu has been doing fairly well since it launched just over a week ago. As readers may remember, SwCpoker is the reincarnation of bitcoin site SealswithClubs.com, which officially shut down on February 20th, nine days after law enforcement officials raided the site’s chairman and founder Bryan Micon’s Las Vegas home. The site has moved to Antigua and has been spreading a wide variety of games, including badacey, badeucey, and Open Face Chinese pineapple. PokerScout reports that cash game traffic is in the 50-60 player range, compared to 90-100 for SealswithClubs. SwC is a newborn, though, so it is not a bad start at all.
PokerScout went a step further and looked at the Open Face Chinese pineapple games, which it apparently does not normally count in the cash game traffic figures. If those are added in, the seven day average traffic at SwC climbs to 100, with a peak of about 160. Non-hold’em poker varieties make up half of SwC’s cash game traffic.
Also of note are the VIP system changes implemented by partypoker beginning on March 1st. The highlight of the changes is that it has become much easier to climb the VIP level ladder and VIP points are still earned in exactly the same way. PokerScout reports, though, that players have not been particularly flocking to partypoker since the change, with a cash game traffic increase of about 5 percent since the changes were made. partypoker also ran the Loyalty Launcher promotion from March 1st through March 8th in conjunction with the VIP changes.
PokerStars is still number one, though with a seven day average of 18,500 cash game players, its numbers have been falling for the last few weeks. 888poker is second with 2,500 cash game players, followed by the iPoker Network (2,000), Bodog (1,900), and PokerStars.it (1,700).
