Poker players who inexplicably stayed with one of the iPoker Network’s “Tier 2” poker rooms after the network split into two parts in September 2012 have reason to celebrate, as PokerStrategy.com reports that the network will fuse its tiers tomorrow, creating a single network once again.
Online poker rooms and networks have come up with all sorts of ways to try to increase the proportion of recreational players to professional players over the years – Full Tilt just tore apart its entire cash game system – but iPoker’s strategy three years ago was quite the surprise. Tired of watching its member skins just use bigger and bigger rakeback deals to draw players, the network created two, separate network tiers. “Tier 1” was for the member rooms who had an acceptable proportion of casual players to pros (read: losers to winners), while “Tier 2” was for those who didn’t market effectively and how too many highly skilled grinders.
In order to be invited to the top tier, a poker room had to have at least 6,000 active players in a month and add at least 850 new players, each of whom had to contribute at least five dollars of rake. Other factors were examined, such as deposit to cashout ratios, as well.
Naturally, Tier 1 was the desirable tier, as it would be filled with weaker players. The rooms in that tier also tended to be larger, something that generally went part and parcel with proper marketing to recreational players. Those “recs” are usually net-money losers, distributing their funds throughout the poker network and often re-depositing. They are good for the poker economy. The pros and high volume grinders, while generating a lot of rake, drain recreational players of their money and cash much of it out.
Those rooms that expected to start in Tier 2 knew it was going to be trouble, so some made arrangements to avoid it in advance. Pokerhuis and Gutshot Poker departed the network before the forced split, for example, while Celeb Poker merged into Titan Poker, one of the original members of Tier 1.
It is not exactly clear whether or not this was a three-year failure of an experiment, though the numbers are not good. Right now, the iPoker Network is fourth in PokerScout’s cash game rankings, with a seven-day average of 1,250 players. That is significantly behind third place Bodog, which has 1,700, and second place 888poker, which has 2,100, and not even in the same solar system of PokerStars and its 14,500 players. Just before the network was split, it had 2,900 cash game players.
That severe drop is not necessarily because of the split, though, as the industry as a whole has seen its liquidity decline during that time period. It is totally possible that iPoker’s numbers would have been worse if it had not split, but considering it is going back to the old structure probably means that the split at least didn’t help enough to make it worth keeping.
