A miracle has happened in the online poker industry. No, Senator Harry Reid didn’t yell “April Fools!” No, Sheldon Adelson wasn’t thrown into the Death Star’s reactor shaft by Darth Vader. Nothing that miraculous. For the first time in two months, online poker cash game traffic actually rose during the week, increasing one percent, according to traffic monitoring site, PokerScout.com.
It is not like one percent is incredible, but it is something, especially considering the market couldn’t muster that much in any of the previous seven weeks. The top of PokerScout’s charts looked particularly healthy, with nine of the top ten sites and networks showing increases in traffic. PokerStars, of course, is still the top dog, with a seven-day average of 18,000 cash game players, followed by 888poker with 2,600. iPoker moved back into the third spot with 1,800, knocking Bodog (1,700 cash game players) back to fourth. Full Tilt Poker (1,600) switched places with PokerStars.it (1,500) for the next two spots. PartyPoker is next in the seventh spot with 1,400 players and then there’s a drop to eighth and Winamax.fr, which has a seven-day average of 1,150 cash game players. Adjarabet is right behind with 1,100 and rounding out the top ten in PokerScout’s rankings are PokerStars.fr and PokerStars.es, which are tied with 900 cash game players.
In its Weekly Online Poker Traffic Update, PokerScout makes an interesting observation that the recent Nevada and Delaware player pool merge that took place about two weeks ago has not actually done all that much to help traffic. It has certainly been a boon to players in Delaware, as before the merger, cash game counts were in the single digits and now they are sitting at 170, but the effect on combined traffic has been minimal. It was thought that one of the biggest benefits of the merger was that games would stay active later into the night out east. Nevada is three hours behind Delaware, and as it is Nevada that has the larger player base (by a mile, which says something about how small Delaware’s is), the idea was that at the times at night when traffic in Delaware would become non-existent, the tables would now still be active, as Nevada players would be logging on.
It makes perfect sense, in theory: players in Delaware may be getting to bed at 11:00pm ET, but that is a time when Nevada players would just be getting started, as it is 8:00pm PT. Before the merger, people in Delaware who might want to play late at night but saw empty tables would now see plenty of activity. Thus, overall traffic from Delaware would actually pickup, as those who would otherwise have not played are now logging on.
PokerScout says that the prime time hours ARE longer now and peak figures do last longer, but that crash does still happen. Overall combined traffic between the two states rose with the excitement of the merger, but the growth has not sustained.
That doesn’t mean that things won’t get better and for Delaware players, things are much, much better than they were, but it is interesting to see that the high hopes have been dashed a bit.