View From The Sky
After 11 consecutive weeks of decline, the overall market finally posted a gain this week, up a healthy 2%. 9 out of the top 10 poker sites experienced a gain, so the comeback was very broad based. The market is still off 8% from last year, but is now at least moving in the right direction finally.
Party Poker replaced Full Tilt Poker in fourth place, who dropped to fifth. Pokerstars.fr regained tenth place from Adjarabet, bringing all 4 Poker Stars sites back into the top 10.
Free Fast Fold At 888
Fast fold poker certainly didn’t get much of a fast start at 888 Poker, where it languished at only about 1.5% of their cash game traffic for most of its history. Things have picked up though for them in 2014 though, from an increased focus on this.
Fast fold poker already rose to 3 times its previous levels this year so far, but 888 is going for more though as they seek to capture a greater market share in this format, which also features a much better rake per hour per table than normal speed tables, something that all poker rooms are interested in. So they now are running a promotion to get more players involved, involving fast fold tournaments and giving away twice daily prizes of $5000 and the opportunity to win a ride in a fighter jet. This is really boosting their fast fold participation rate which now stands at a hefty 11% of overall cash game traffic.
New Jersey Continues To Dominate
New Jersey continues their dominance of the U.S. regulated online poker market, with a 70% market share, well outpacing their second place rival, Nevada, at 28%. Bringing up the rear is Delaware with only a 2% market share, an embarrassingly small amount. New Jersey does have 9 times the population of Delaware though so it’s not surprising that there are a lot more online poker players in the larger state. However, 35 times as many players is a lot more, and this goes to show just how lame the Delaware market has been, and how much work they have to do.
Nevada, on the other hand, have been holding their own pretty well when you compare population and market share, and the ratio is much closer to the actual population differences compared to New Jersey, although still lower than may be expected.
Unibet’s War Of Independence
Unibet experienced a nice increase after they recently split from Microgaming to go off on their own, which in this day and age of the poker network, was an unusual move to say the least.
After initially climbing to 17th place last month, things have settled down a lot and they have now slipped to 24th, as the excitement from this has waned. Microgaming, or MPN as it is known these days, sits in 14th place, and has kept things together pretty nicely after the loss of one of their major skins.
New York Introduces New Online Poker Bill
The state of New York has moved forward with another online poker bill, as a companion bill to the one recently introduced, in their ongoing attempt to get in on the online poker scene in the near future. The new bill focuses more on the issue of whether poker is to be considered a game of skill or not, to combat the problem of present legislation prohibiting games of chance. In spite of a court ruling in the state finding that it is not primarily a game of skill, it argues that the courts should not excessively limit the legislature to determine these things themselves, and in essence that is true since the courts interpret current laws and the state is free to make new ones.
So this should not really be a roadblock if and when the will is there although the current laws will probably need to be changed of course. This might take a while though but they are already talking licensing fees and tax rates, so that’s a good sign for sure.
Full Tilt Brings Out Big Leaderboard Promotion
In an effort to regain more of their past glory, Full Tilt Poker is getting ready to roll out a huge leaderboard promotion, with a total of $23,000 on the line for their players to compete for.
There will be two separate leaderboards broken up by stake levels, and rather than just compiling a total of play for the day, this one is set at a player’s best 150 hand run during the day, making it possible for them to keep playing and improving their score, while at the same time giving all players a better chance to compete, rather than just limiting the goodies to the massive volume players This is an innovative idea and may set a trend for these types of promotions. One thing about Full Tilt is that they have always been a trend setter and this promotion should beef things up for them nicely, in the short run at least.
