For the first time in three months, the internet poker industry experienced a rise in its cash game traffic. According to PokerScout.com’s Weekly Online Poker Traffic Update, online poker cash game liquidity was up one percent last week. While that does not sound like much (and it’s really not), it is mildly exciting because the last time cash game traffic showed an upward tick was the week of April 5th.
The one percent increase is made a little more impressive due to the fact that PokerStars continues to trend downwards. It wasn’t all that long ago that its seven-day average for cash game traffic was well over 20,000, but now it’s down to 14,500, and that’s after it was at 15,000 the previous week.
Filling out PokerScout’s top five are 888poker with 2,200 cash game players, Bodog with 1,700, the iPoker Network with 1,350, and PokerStar’s Italian regulated site, PokerStars.it, with 1,150.
In sixth is the French poker site, Winamax.fr, with 1,100 cash game players. Winamax’s cash game numbers have been soaring of late because of the poker room’s Cash Game Bingo promotion. PokerScout reports that on the promo’s very first day, cash game traffic was up 105 percent from the previous week. As often happens with novelty promotions, the traffic dropped as the days went on, but numbers are still about 25 percent above normal.
It is not surprising that Winamax showed this pattern, not just because it is fairly common, but also because Cash Game Bingo is kind of a bullshit promotion. It is legitimate, don’t get me wrong, but it’s so random and unrewarding and convoluted that it just seems like a huge pain in the ass. Every player at Hold’em and Omaha cash game tables gets a “bingo” card on which 14 different playing cards are depicted. When one of those playing cards are amongst your hole cards in a hand (only the first two hole cards count in Omaha), they are checked off the bingo card. Check off all 14 playing cards and you win cash! Sounds simple enough. It’s all luck, but it’s kind of fun.
But you have to complete the bingo card within 50 hands.
And if a playing card that was already checked is dealt again, it becomes unchecked, so you then have to receive it a THIRD time in however many of the 50 hands you have remaining.
Then there is the booster hand, which is an extra pair of playing cards, which if checked, increases your possible jackpot ten times over. With the booster, though, checked cards are not unchecked if dealt again.
And if you do win the jackpot, here you bank €50 times the square-root of the following: the number of miles earned during the process of completing the bingo card divided by a VIP status multiplier coefficient times 50, the result of which is divided by the number of hands dealt to complete the bingo card minus one. What.
If you don’t complete the bingo card within 50 hands, you get a new one. You can also request a new one at any time. Winamax guarantees that at least €100,000 will be paid out in this promo; to date, only €39,000 has.
So, yeah, have fun with that.
