Popular Poker Sites After "Black
Friday"
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Whether American poker players think of
it as Black Friday or simply “April 15th, 2011” the lockout of
PokerStars,
Full Tilt Poker, Ultimate Bet, and Absolute Poker has had a huge
impact on internet-based poker all over the world. Traffic is still
shifting around with players settling at new homes and poker
professionals considering a move overseas in the aftermath of the
American government’s crackdown on offshore-based online poker
sites. This isn’t the first time that changes to gambling law in the
US has impacted poker worldwide. The passage of a minor piece of
legislation tacked on to a counterterrorism measure in 2006 had an
enormous impact on the online poker industry.
With online poker sites dropping out of the US market left and right
it begs the question of which online poker sites are the most
popular now after another sweeping change to US online gaming law?
Thanks to PokerScout, we can see in black and white exactly which
online poker sites are thriving and which are falling apart. In
particular, the Cereus Poker Network (home to Ultimate Bet and
Absolute Poker) has lost more than 75% of their player traffic in
the three weeks since American online poker’s Black Friday, turning
what was once a popular poker site for US players into little more
than an afterthought. The refusal of Cereus to release player funds
is largely responsible for their dismal player numbers.
In contrast the Merge Gaming Network,
which was largely unaffected by the Black Friday shutdowns, has
gained the most in terms of sheer number of players, swelling its
membership by 77% in less than a month. Unfortunately, Merge has
also temporarily discontinued new US signups until an unspecified
time in the future when their payment processing and support woes
subside. The great Black Friday exodus of US poker players hasn’t
had a measurable effect on the customer base for the top European
poker sites as of yet, largely due to the fact that non-US players
can continue to play at
PokerStars
and most European poker rooms stopped accepting US players back in
2006.
The State of the US
Poker Market
The events of online poker's Black Friday have had a domino effect
on the entire industry, even beyond those poker rooms directly
affected by US indictments. Remarkably, the remaining poker rooms in
the US market were suddenly loathe to accommodate the influx of US
players looking for new homes. The same US poker rooms that would
have liked nothing more than to reign supreme in the US market a
month ago were now buckling under the pressure that these new
players were putting on their payment processing. Remaining US poker
rooms like Bodog,
Lock Poker,
and Carbon Poker
eventually stopped accepting US players altogether until some
nebulous time in the future when they can handle the new-player
volume.
With the US poker market shrinking to
unrecognizable levels one poker room is actually launching amidst
the chaos.
BetOnline has built a solid reputation over the years as one of
the strongest sports/casino gaming sites online and they're taking a
chance on the US market by opening a completely independent poker
platform. The timing of this couldn't be better with thousands of US
players starved for a new home.
BetOnline
isn't a skin of any existing network and features extremely loose
tables due to their built-in gamble-centric player base.
BetOnline also
is somehow offering e-check deposits to all US players in addition
to block-free credit card deposits. While the US poker market is
extremely thin I would definitely recommend
BetOnline over
the only other dependable open US network in
Cake Poker.
Black Friday
Shutdown By the Numbers
One way to get an idea of the most popular online poker sites is to
see how different sites’ numbers moved around after the shutdown of
the four largest poker sites catering to American wagers. The four
heavy hitters in the European market changed very little, and no
sort of trend has developed as of this writing.
In the week following the crackdown, overall
Party Poker
increased 8% only to fall about 7% the week after. PokerScout
suggests that last week’s 10% gain in poker player membership at
Party Poker
is due more to their popular Gladiator WSOP promotion and large
freeroll tournaments rather than the fallout of Black Friday.
The iPoker Network has actually seen a slight decrease in membership
since the beginning of the US poker fiasco, though it is an
insignificant decrease of less than half a percent. Popular iPoker
rooms include
William
Hill Poker and
Titan Poker.
The Ongame Network has dropped a more substantial four percent,
while 888poker has posted some sort of gain in traffic every week
since the crackdown happened on April 15th, ending the three-week
period with a five percent increase in traffic.
Online Poker
Sites Ranked by Traffic
PokerScout is the go-to source for player traffic at poker sites the
world around. Looking at a daily snapshot of traffic at various
online poker sites is the best way to get an idea of which sites are
trending upward and which are losing players faster than a bankrupt
football club. Here’s a look at the daily traffic reports from May
10th of 2011 as reported on by
Online
Poker Sites:
PokerStars
Right now,
PokerStars can still boast the title of the largest online poker
room with a seven day average of 21,600 cash players, according to
PokerScout. As I write this, the “peak” number of cash players over
the last 24 hours hit 38,038, impressive because that number is
almost double that of the nearest competitor. In terms of traffic
and density of cash players
PokerStars is
winning a landslide victory over the competition despite its loss of
the US market.
Full Tilt Poker
Though it is currently the second most popular online poker site,
Full Tilt Poker can boast fewer than half the number of players
currently online at
PokerStars.
The average number of cash players at Full Tilt over the last week
is just over 11,000, also about half the average traffic at the
poker site at the top of the list. The peak number of players over
the past 24 hours is just under 20,000. Please note that since this
article was posted Full Tilt Poker has come under serious scrutiny
due to their inability to fulfill player withdrawals. We cannot
currently recommend this poker room to our visitors.
Party Poker
As soon as you move down the list past number two, Full Tilt Poker,
there’s a massive drop off in patronage. There are just 12,023
players online at
Party Poker as of this writing—less than half of the number of
cash players at
PokerStars. The average number of cash players at
Party Poker
this week is just over 3,000, with peak cash game traffic around
7,000 over the past 24 hours. For a more an in-depth look at the
history of this poker room's relationship with the US market visit
our
Party Poker for US Players page.
iPoker
Compared to the number one and two poker sites on the list, iPoker
at the number 4 spot is a drop in the bucket. There are 5,156
players online, 4,551 of them playing cash games. The peak crowd at
iPoker over the past 24 hours numbered just 6,676 and their average
number of cash game players in the past week is 3,550. Our
recommended iPoker sites are
William
Hill Poker and
Titan Poker.
Ongame
Rounding out the top five most popular online poker sites is Ongame,
with 12,300+ players online. This would push them up to number three
one the list if it weren’t for the fact that so few of them are
playing in cash games—just 3,173. Average number of cash game
players over the past week is just above 2,000, with a 24-hour peak
crowd of 4,664.
Why Are Some
Poker Sites More Popular Than Others?
This is actually a more complex question than it seems. Some chalk
up the “popularity” of a particular website exclusively to marketing
with the idea being that the more times the average internet user
hears a website’s name or URL the more popular that site becomes. A
poker site’s popularity is based on more than the caliber of
celebrities that endorse the site or the frequency of commercial
advertising promoting the site’s qualities. Poker players are a
particular lot. They want certain things from an online poker site,
advertising and celebrity endorsement be damned.
Accessibility
If a poker site is inaccessible to a large portion of the world
poker community it will lose popularity. That’s what we’ve seen with
changes to US gambling law in the past and it seems to be what we’re
seeing today. After the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling
Enforcement Act) in 2006 a number of poker sites closed their doors
to US wagers and the impact of that decision resonates to this day.
Party Poker,
once valued at nearly $8.5 billion by investors, didn’t even wait
for then-President George W. Bush to sign the UIGEA into law,
restricting American wagers immediately after the bill was passed
into law by US legislators. All other publicly-traded online
gambling sites on the London Stock Exchange followed suit and the
Exchange lost a total of $8 billion in value in just a few days of
trading.
Party Poker
was once the most popular online poker site in the world, but when
they restricted their largest market (US online poker players) their
popularity waned. Accessibility is a big issue when it comes to
determining the most popular poker site online.
Conversely, the passing of the UIGEA in 2006 didn’t affect
PokerStars at
all as they remained open to US players. Since
PokerStars
is, as of this writing, the world’s most popular online poker site,
you see what impact staying accessible to US wagers had on their
business. Full Tilt Poker also remained open to American wagers and
the UIGEA was a boon for their business. These two poker rooms
absorbed much of the US traffic that was forced to vacate
Party Poker
and other newly-restricted poker rooms.
Language
Language is accessibility of another variety. If all poker sites
only communicated in English (catering exclusively to the huge
markets in the US and English speakers in Europe and Asia) they’d be
missing out on a good deal of business. Poker is played in many
countries and speakers of all world languages argue the relative
merits of ABC poker or bluffing styles. If you’ve spent any time
shopping for an online poker site you’ve probably seen the
ridiculously long lists of languages available to poker players at
certain rooms such as
Party Poker
or Everest
Poker.
Party Poker
is currently available in 19 different languages (including
simplified Chinese, Romani, and Slovenian) while
PokerStars is
available in 29 and counting.
PokerStars
includes many more obscure tongues that
Party Poker
ignores: Magyar (spoken by 16 million Hungarians worldwide), Eesti
(spoken by just over a million Estonian people), and Icelandic
(spoken by just 300,000 worldwide). It may seem like
PokerStars is
going way out on a limb by including languages spoken by what is
essentially just a handful of people, but this is one fairly easy
way to market your site to a larger audience. Even if there are only
twenty or thirty thousand Estonians who want to gamble online do you
think they’ll choose
Party Poker
or PokerStars?
Promotions
Online poker players are, after all, interested in money. The
variety and amount of promotions put together by a given poker site
can have a big impact on that site’s popularity. Whether you’re
talking about seats at the WSOP, rakeback programs, bonuses, or any
other “freebie” or “nearly-freebie,” the volume of giveaways surely
has at least as much to do with a site’s traffic volume as the
number of languages it offers its services in.
PokerStars
has always offered the most seats at WSOP events with as many as
fifteen or twenty times the number of seats offered at
Party Poker
and twenty or thirty times as many seats offered by European sites
like Everest
Poker.
TV & Radio Advertising
As little as I like to admit it, advertising must have some impact
on the popularity of online poker sites. Different online poker
sites have different poker celebs and poker pros endorsing their
services.
PokerStars
has the perfect triumvirate of poker pros endorsing them: Chris
Moneymaker, Greg Raymer, and Joe Hachem all won their spot at the
WSOP event they ultimately won through
PokerStars,
so it just makes sense that they would endorse
PokerStars.
Party Poker
loses out on the endorsement and advertising game. They haven’t run
a serious advertising campaign in a number of years, and are
endorsed by names like Mike Sexton. You may be wondering: “Who?” and
you aren’t alone. Mike Sexton is the TV host of the World Poker
Tour, acquired by
Party Poker in 2009.
The Most
Popular Online Poker Sites in 2020
Trying to forecast which poker sites will be at the top of the heap
almost a decade from now may seem like a futile waste of time.
However, I think we can look at recent trends (and a few long-term
indicators) and come up with a set of realistic markers by which to
judge the future popularity of the world’s top poker sites.
Though it is impossible to know exactly how online gaming
legislation in the US will move forward over the course of the next
two presidential terms we can offer two possible outcomes. Should
Barack Obama win re-election in 2012 and should his administration
follow the party line (as evidenced by Representative Barney Frank’s
push to legalize and tax all online gaming in the US) we could see
new markets opening for American wagers.
If online gaming is legalized or if
restrictions on American wagers are relaxed the current list of the
most popular online poker sites could see some drastic changes.
Remember that
Party Poker was top of the heap when American wagers were
unrestricted . Could
Party Poker
use a return to their previous US wagering capabilities to jump back
to the top spot? Would some new online poker room appear to snap up
the wandering masses of US poker players and draw customers away
from European sites? It’s impossible to say but rest assured that
any move towards less restriction in the US market would have a
lasting effect on the online poker industry.
Should the opposite happen and Barack Obama lose to a far more
conservative presidential candidate we could see further
restrictions on the US online poker market. If Americans are
completely restricted from playing poker online the European sites
would become top dogs in the online poker world. Of course, the
largest single piece of the online-poker-playing community would
disappear and traffic volumes would suffer worldwide. Ultimately,
any move to further restrict the ability of US residents to play
poker online would have a negative effect on worldwide poker play
with sites offering fewer promotions and possibly closing up shop
for good.
We may not know the name of the world’s most popular online poker
site in the year 2020. Some upstart poker room could appear,
accepting wagers from Americans, offering unheard of promotions,
available in dead and dying languages (wagers in Latin?), and
handing out cash to their members like it was going out of style. Or
we could remain pretty much where we are, with
PokerStars
and Party Poker
scrambling for player traffic.
Trying to determine which online poker site is “the most popular” is
similar to counting grains of sand as they fall through your
fingers. Who could have known on April 14th that US wagers at the
four most popular online poker sites catering to Americans would be
locked out the next day? What is the next big event on the horizon
that will impact traffic at
PokerStars or
Party Poker
or even upstart US poker rooms like
BetOnline?
The popularity of a given online poker site is a complex equation,
involving some mix of the indescribable quality known as “prestige,”
a dash of accessibility, the promotions offered by a given site,
television and radio advertising, and good old-fashioned luck. Poker
sites fall in and out of favor at the whim of online poker players,
by their willingness to cooperate with the gambling public, and by
their passion for handing out free stuff to their members. Every
other aspect of an online poker site’s popularity is best left up to
the internet gods, who smile on some and ignore others altogether.
As it stands now, the top three online poker sites by traffic are
PokerStars,
Full Tilt Poker, and
Party Poker,
in that order. With the Cereus Network (and a few other online poker
rooms) essentially folding under the dead weight of their banished
US customers and online poker rooms firing their sponsored players
and reneging on promotional offers, who knows how Black Friday’s
impact on world poker popularity will shake out? We in the online
poker community can only hope for a change in the US government’s
attitude toward online poker wagers. What’s good for US online poker
is good for online poker worldwide.
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