PokerScout.com released its Weekly Online Poker Traffic Update on Saturday, reporting yet another difficult seven day stretch for the internet poker industry. Cash game traffic fell two percent last week with seven of the top ten networks and sites experiencing down weeks.
There was some slight shifting in the top ten, as Bodog moved up to fourth place with a seven day average of 1,900 cash game players (figures as of Monday) and PokerStars.it slid to fifth with 1,700 cash game players. Adjarabet moved up to ninth (it is now down to eleventh with an average of 850 cash game players) and PokerStars.es went down to tenth (now ninth with 1,050 players).
PokerStars, as usual, is the number one poker site on the internet, boasting a seven day average of 19,000 cash players, though that is not really all that great, considering it has been over 20,000 in the past. 888poker is currently in the second slot with 2,500 cash game players, followed by the iPoker Network with 2,000. Full Tilt Poker is in sixth with 1,600 players, partypoker is seventh with 1,500, and Winamax.fr is in eighth with 1,250.
Adjarabet had made its way up to ninth last week thanks in large part to the reworking of a promotion that temporarily increased its popularity, so says PokerScout. In November, the Georgia-based poker site launched its Magic Hand promotion in which it was to award money for the participants and winner of every 5,000th hand until 1 million GEL were distributed. It had estimated that the Magic Hands promotion would last two months, but three months in and the total prize pool had yet to be awarded. As such, Adjarabet began speeding up the promotion, increasing the frequency of Magic Hands five-fold. According to PokerScout, traffic on the site increased by a quarter.
PokerScout says that a big reason Adjarabet sped up the Magic Hands promo is that it had plans to migrate its player traffic over to the Microgaming Network’s (MPN) servers. It already had a room on MPN, but it was basically useless, so this formal full-fledged move to MPN should help in the long-run. For now, Adjarabet’s tables are separate from MPN’s, but we assume that they will merge at some point. Adjarabet wanted to try to get the promotion finished before the migration in case there were hiccups, but everything went just fine.
PokerScout also notes that iPoker France has made a huge move in the French online poker market. “Over a three week span beginning in mid-January,” PokerScout reports, “liquidity on France’s then fourth most trafficked operator surged over 31%. This unprecedented period of growth propelled the network past PartyPoker France, which at the dawn of the New Year, held a 23% edge over its competitor.”
iPoker France and partypoker France are now tied with a seven day average of 575 cash game players.
