It’s not a meteoric rise in traffic, but it’s something. Online poker monitoring site PokerScout.com reported yesterday that for the second week in a row, online poker cash game traffic increased. Like the previous week, last week’s increase was small – just 0.2 percent – but that’s better than the alternative. Six of the top ten sites and networks saw rises in traffic, while four saw declines.
The site everyone has been following, however, falls way outside of the top ten. Ultimate Poker, the first internet poker room to launch in Nevada in a legal, regulated environment, ranks 37th in the industry with a seven-day average of 158 cash game players at the time of this writing.
After an increase in peak numbers every day for more than a week, Ultimate Poker hit its highest figure on the night of May 8th, when 347 players were logged on. Since then, says PokerScout, things have “stabilized.”
As ESPN’s Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast, my friend.”
Last night, May 13th, 640 cash game players were logged in at 10:16pm Pacific time, nearly double the previous best. Now, PokerScout is not completely incorrect in its assessment that Ultimate Poker’s traffic has settled, despite that huge jump on Monday. It’s a bit of an artificial number, likely resulting from Ultimate Poker’s 1 Millionth Hand promotion. It’s not quite at the 100 Billionth Hand promotion that PokerStars will soon be celebrating, but it’s a start. In the promotion, the winner of the 1 Millionth Hand will receive $500, while everyone else at the table will get $100. Additionally, players in every 10,000th hand starting with 900,000 will receive money as will those in the 999,999th hand.
Players appear to be logging on to Ultimate Poker more than they normally would in order to try to hit it big on one of the milestone hands. The site is currently approaching hand 950,000.
Even after the promotion ends, however, traffic numbers might stay a little bit higher than they were because more people will be able to login than were able last week. Over the weekend, Ultimate Poker confirmed that Verizon Wireless, Cricket Wireless, and Virgin Mobile customers can all now get their accounts verified and begin to play. As part of Ultimate Poker’s geolocation procedure, customers must have their locations triangulated using their cellular phones in addition to having their IP addresses checked. Until this weekend, clients of the aforementioned wireless carriers were unable to complete the location verification process and therefore could not play on Ultimate Poker. Now that they can, we might expect a small bump in traffic.
In other cash game traffic news, PokerScout reports that the top ten stayed almost exactly the same except for the bottom, where MPN (formerly Microgaming) moved up to 10th place, while Bodog slid down to 11th. As Bodog has a seven-day average of 1,140 cash game players and MPN has 1,200, neither is in much danger of dropping below 11th, as the next closest room, Dollaro, has just 750 cash game players.
