According to report from Poker Affiliate Solutions, the Merge Gaming Network will begin allowing new players from the United States to sign up at its member poker rooms within the next week. One of the rooms on the network, Sportsbook.com, started accepting new U.S. customers yesterday.
We reported back in July that it did appear that this would happen, thanks to a report by our friends at PocketFives.com, and this news, again from a source close to both the Merge Gaming Network and the original reporting site, further confirms it. Merge shut its doors to new U.S. customers in the beginning of June, but unlike sites such as PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker, it was doing so by choice and the plan was to make it just a temporary move. The Merge Poker Network was the biggest beneficiary of the legal problems of its competitors and saw a huge influx of new U.S. customers looking for a new place to play. While this was good for Merge and its member sites, it created the problem of cashout delays in an environment that was already inhospitable to U.S. payment processing.
Because of the two week backlog that the network was experiencing, the powers that be made the decision to put a cork in the flow of U.S. refugees so that it could catch up to payment requests and keep its existing, loyal customers happy. Of course, the question remains as to how smooth payment processing will be once new American customers start to come back.
Merge, while not a particularly large network, is still easily the most significant of the few U.S. facing networks that remain. It’s seven day average of 1,240 cash game players, according to PokerScout.com, makes it the 10th largest poker network or standalone room on the internet. The next largest is Bodog with a seven day average of 960 cash game players, but it announced in July that it will stop serving U.S. customers at the end of the year. With a new wave of U.S. players, Merge might be able to push past Winamax.fr and the Microgaming Network into the 8th spot in the rankings. Winamax is 100 cash players ahead with 1,340 on average over the last seven days, while Microgaming field 1,360 per day. It will take a 50 percent gain in traffic to overtake PokerStars’ French offering, which has a seven day average of 1,840 cash game players.
Year-over-year, the Merge Gaming Network, whose poker rooms include the likes of Lock Poker, Carbon Poker, Hero Poker, Poker Host, Iron Duke, and RPM Poker, has seen its traffic increase 75 percent, though growth has slowed of late. The rooms on the Merge Network had been a destination for players looking for a new room for rakeback, but the network stopped accepting new rakeback sign ups on June 1st, opting to use its VIP program as its lone loyalty offering. Any players who already had rakeback before the cutoff date have been allowed to keep it.