Because of what I do for living, I spend much of my free time and almost all of my “at-work” time on the internet. Now, I know that the people I run into online are really just a representative sample of the general real-life population, but man, I could swear sometimes that the intelligence quotient of the average internet message board poster is a tick below people I see everyday with my own eyes. Case in, point, this guy.
A member of a popular poker forum had a question eating away at him. It was so important and so impossible to have answered through basic, logical thought or simple Google searches that he had to create a new thread to bother everyone with it.
“Why is poker stars so popular?” he queried. “Besides from the good client, and good support i dont understand why the majority of the players, who most play micro and such play there and they get next to nothing on rakeback?”
I did not respond to this guy in his forum thread, but I am going to briefly take a stab at an answer here in this column. I actually could just stop right now and say that he answered his own question, but I am going to expand on it a bit. To me, first and foremost, PokerStars is popular because it’s big. And we’re not just talking big, we’re talking the biggest poker room in the known universe. And we’re not just talking the biggest, we’re talking the biggest by far. As I write this, the average number of cash game players at PokerStars in the past seven days is 25,000 according to PokerScout.com. Full Tilt, the number two site, has just barely more than half that, 13,200. At its 24-hour peak, PokerStars had over 41,000 cash game players online simultaneously, more than twice what Full Tilt had at its peak. In fact, PokerStars is bigger that the next five poker rooms combined and is bigger than all of its competitors combined if you take Full Tilt out of the equation.
It should be obvious, but the benefit of this is that players know they will always be able to find a game, or two, or three, or twenty, at PokerStars. This is in stark contrast to a site like, say, Cake Poker, which I have really enjoyed, but which has gotten to the point where I can only find one table of my preferred game if I’m lucky. Casual players and multi-tabling grinders alike can login to Stars at any given time and find exactly what they want in an instant. Note, as well, that the stats I presented only reference cash games. PokerStars (as well as Full Tilt, which does also have excellent player traffic) has tons of tournaments, night and day.
Before I continue, I should mention that I am not hyping up PokerStars for any reason except to point out the silliness of the message board post I quoted earlier. There are many poker rooms out there and all have their advantages and disadvantages. Stars just happens to be the most popular. In fact, I haven’t even played at PokerStars in months – I have a different room of choice.
As to the poster’s point about rakeback, I do understand where he is coming from there, but his logic is partially flawed. He says most players play micro stakes, which I believe is true, so they would be better off earning rakeback elsewhere because PokerStars’ VIP program does little for them. First, I think he is overestimating how much rakeback a microstakes player can earn. Second, he is forgetting that serious players amongst the microstakes population are in the extreme minority. Casual players are in the vast majority, and casual players generally don’t care or even know about rakeback. Therefore, were they to play somewhere else, chances are they wouldn’t be getting rakeback because they wouldn’t know to sign up through an affiliate, so the little boost they can get in VIP rewards at PokerStars is better, anyway.
And then there are the two points the poster made, which would often be enough to make poker room popular without the size (although as the popularity would increase, so would the player traffic). The site has excellent software. It has never been my personal absolute favorite, but it typically runs very smoothly, can handle multitudes of open tables at once, and is much less buggy than most. So of course players are going to gravitate more towards a site with quality software over one with a crappy offering. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. And as for customer service, who wouldn’t prefer to deal with a company like that? This is one reason I have liked the aforementioned Cake Network and one reason I used to play at Bodog (I haven’t played at Bodog in a while primarily because of a lack of traffic). It seems that in PokerStars’ case, its reputation for consistently high quality customer service precedes it and does get players interested in trying out the site.
It doesn’t take a genius to see why PokerStars is the 800-pound gorilla of the industry. Unfortunately, some people fall on the end of the scale that is the opposite of genius, so I felt the need to step forward and explain it to them. On the bright side, it gave me something to write about.
PokerStars has integrity in an industry where it is too often lacking. Its size is somewhat of a problem though because it’s never good for consumers when one business dominates any industry too much.
And Bodog’s traffic on its limit hold’em is indeed weak these days.