Expectations were high with the launch of Caesar Interactive Entertainment’s WSOP.com Thursday. For the first time since its debut on April 30th, Ultimate Poker no longer had a monopoly in the online poker industry in Nevada. Many thought that WSOP.com would instantly become the dominant player of the two, as despite Ultimate Poker’s first-mover advantage, WSOP.com has the name and the bigger, better-known properties. Not so says cash game traffic monitoring site PokerScout.com. Not so.
On WSOP’s first day, its cash game traffic maxed out at 113 players. Not all that bad for the inaugural day when the player base only comes from the 35th largest state in the United States. But Ultimate Poker, with a name that conjured up memories of UltimateBet and fairly basic software (WSOP uses 888’s software), peaked at 136 cash game players on its first day. On Friday, WSOP’s traffic dipped to 102, then fell to 77 on Saturday. It wasn’t until Sunday that traffic rebounded, peaking at 152. For comparison, Ultimate Poker’s traffic rose for several days after launch, almost reaching 250 on its fourth day.
PokerScout points to the “soft launch” of WSOP.com as the main reason why it has struggled in comparison to Ultimate Poker. Whereas Ultimate Poker had the hype machine running full bore, both online and at Stations Casinos properties around the Las Vegas area (Ultimate Poker is owned by Stations), the only real advertising for WSOP.com was at the Rio during the World Series of Poker this summer. Advertising to the more casual potential customer base has not happened yet. When it does, PokerScout surmises that it will not only attract players to WSOP.com, but also bring attention to Nevada online poker as a whole, expanding the market.
A larger market resulting from WSOP.com awareness may be both good and bad for Ultimate Poker. On the one hand, a larger market means more players. On the other hand, the more people learn about WSOP.com, the more of a chance there is that players will forego Ultimate Poker for WSOP. Case in point, PokerScout reports that since WSOP’s launch, Ultimate Poker’s average cash game figures have fallen 14 percent. This, in turn, means that about half of WSOP’s traffic has come from Ultimate Poker.
In other industry traffic news, 888Poker moved ahead of Full Tilt Poker for the first time in its history (aside from when Full Tilt was gone after Black Friday). 888 now ranks third with a seven day average of 2,150 cash game players, 100 ahead of Full Tilt and 150 behind the iPoker Network. PokerStars is still the 800-pound gorilla, lording over everyone else with a seven day average of 20,800 cash game players.
Overall, online poker traffic is down 10 percent from the same time last year and two percent from the previous week.
