Merge May Accept New U.S. Customers Soon

Online poker players in the United States may have the chance to hop back onto a few rooms soon if all goes to plan.  It appears that the Merge Gaming Network intends to re-open its doors to new American customers by the end of the month.

Our friends at PocketFives.com originally broke the news last Wednesday, saying that “a source close to the network” informed them that Merge sites could begin welcoming back new U.S. players as early as two weeks from that day.  There is no guarantee that it will be that soon, as no date has been officially set, but it looks like it will happen at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later.

It was the beginning of June when Merge made the decision to stop accepting new U.S. customers.  At the time, Merge indicated that the move was only temporary, and with the most recent news, it does seem that the network will remain true to its intentions.  Unlike other poker rooms such as PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, the rooms on the Merge Gaming Network did not shut out Americans because they were in trouble or afraid of trouble (and those other sites banned all U.S. accounts, both new and existing).  Just the opposite, actually.  Merge remained open to U.S. players, but saw such a flood of refugees from other sites that left the U.S. market that it began to have payment processing problems. At the time of the temporary ban, the Merge Gaming Network was looking at a two week backlog for cashout requests.  Rather than risking making things worse and angering loyal customers, network officials decided the safest decision was to just halt growth for a while so it could catch up.

The Merge Gaming Network has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Black Friday indictments on April 15th.  A month later, the network’s cash game traffic had grown by 79 percent, according to PokerScout.com.  As of the time of this article, the number of cash game players at Merge has doubled since the same time a year ago.  The network, which includes poker rooms such as Lock Poker, Carbon Poker, Hero Poker, Poker Host, Iron Duke, and RPM Poker, currently hold the 10th spot on PokerScout’s cash game traffic rankings, though it has been as high as 8th.  Before Black Friday, Merge wasn’t even in the top 20, so it has come a long way.  With a seven day average of 1,300 cash game players, it is just 20 behind Winamax.fr.  It will take a bit of a jump in traffic to make it back to 8th, as the Microgaming Network is 140 players ahead of Merge.  While 140 may not seems like much, that would still require 10 percent growth if Microgaming’s traffic remains steady.

It will be interesting to see if Merge comes up with any new cashout options once it invites new U.S. customers back or if all will remain the same.  With traditional online payment processors essentially out of the picture nowadays, the best vehicle for cashing out is the simple paper check.  While it can currently take as long as two months to have a check processed, virtually any player would agree that a slow payment is better than none.