View From The Sky
Worldwide online poker traffic posted a 2% increase this week over last week, as the busier late summer and fall season starts to kick off. In spite of this gain, year over year numbers stayed steady, being down the same 8% as last week.
Pokerstars.it achieved its highest ranking ever, moving up all the way to fourth place and knocking Party Poker out of that spot and down to fifth. Bodog moved down from fifth to sixth spot, with Full Tilt dropping down to seventh.
The rest of the top ten was unchanged. 9 out of the top 10 sites gained traffic this week with only one seeing a decrease.
Winamax’s Fast Fold Starting To Fold Fast
Winamax’s success with their version of fast fold poker, called Go Fast Poker, is starting to really decline in popularity off its recent peak. The French online poker site had seen a very impressive 32% of its cash traffic volume at Go Fast Poker, but it seems that some players are already starting to tire of it.
This week, the percentage of overall cash traffic from their fast fold poker format has fallen to only 21.5%, still an impressive number but certainly in decline. This isn’t either unusual or unexpected as it is quite normal for new variants to attract more interest initially, and then taper off as some players simply do not take to it that well.
Winamax is still maintaining their top 10 ranking though and currently sit in eighth place overall, giving the regulated French market two sites in the top 8 worldwide, which is actually pretty impressive.
U.S. Market Rebounds
After some recent struggles, the U.S. regulated online poker market showed a pretty nice gain overall this week, with the leading sites posting a healthy increase.
In New Jersey, traffic leader Party Borgata showed a 9% gain, further increasing their lead over the competition. Second place WSOP New Jersey saw a rise as well, although they saw a much more modest increase of only 1%. Not all sites moved up though, as 888’s All American Network posted a disappointing loss of 10%. They are now sit in 50th in the worldwide poker site rankings with only an average of 55 cash game players.
In Nevada, market leader WSOP moved up an impressive 7%, further increasing their lead over second place Ultimate Poker, who saw a 1% decrease in traffic. Overall the Nevada market is up 4% for the week.
Wanted Play No Longer Wanted
Online poker room Wanted Play is no longer in operation, as they have been shut down. This poker room is known for its high amount of bots at their tables, but the bots may have been their undoing.
The fate of players’ money is not known at this time, and some players are likely concerned as to their being able to withdraw the money they have on account with them. It certainly wouldn’t be good for the industry as a whole though if this doesn’t proceed in an acceptable manner.
In the end, their excessive use of bots may have been their undoing, even more so than a lack of popularity, as it seems that this was what was behind their license being revoked by Malta authorities. There had been warnings of this happening if the bot situation didn’t improve, and it turns out the regulatory body wasn’t bluffing. Players are to submit requests to get back their money to the Malta authority, and it is hoped that they won’t have any trouble getting it back.
PokerStars Invites Poker Players To Lunch
In preparing for a possible launch in the New Jersey market, pending regulatory approval, PokerStars has taken the step of inviting a number of their former players to lunch.
Two sessions are planned, one in Jersey City (at the Vu Lounge of the Hyatt Regency Hotel) and the other in Atlantic City (Landshark Bar & Grill, part of Resorts Casino on the Atlantic City Boardwalk). Former PokerStars VIP players are invited, and this does not seem to be just focused on the high end players either.
This does go to show why PokerStars is the market leader worldwide, as this is a nice touch and even though it is fairly symbolic, PokerStars is known as being a cut above the competition in their concern for their players, and this is a view that they are continuing to work hard on maintaining it seems.
Players have also been pretty critical of the level of customer service offered by the current poker rooms overall in the New Jersey market, and many would certainly welcome the entry of PokerStars into the market, with the hopes that a higher standard will be set.
PokerStars may begin operations in New Jersey as soon as next month, and although it may take a little longer than that to iron everything out, this does appear to be on the fast track and should happen fairly soon.
