In what has become a less and less frequent sight over the last couple years, online poker traffic actually increased last week, according to PokerScout’s Weekly Online Poker Traffic Update. PokerScout, the authority on cash game traffic at the internet tables, says that player counts went up a healthy 3 percent last week compared to the week previous. Seven of the top ten sites and networks saw their traffic bump up, with just two in the top ten declining.
One of those sites that had a successful week was the French poker room Winamax.fr. Last Monday, it launched its version of Fast Fold poker called “Go Fast.” Unfortunately for the room at the time, the game was riddled with bugs, as players reported problems such as tables freezing when more than one was open at once and funds not being returned to accounts when tables were closed. Winamax was forced to shut down the game for a while so that it could address the problem. The games got back up and running last week, though, and so far, results have been fantastic. According to PokerScout, 28 percent of the site’s cash game players were playing in Go Fast games, ranking Winamax’s participation rates right up there with the likes of PartyPoker and PokerStars, who have had their Fast Fold games established for a couple years now. That participation rate destroys that of its rival, PokerStars.fr, which PokerScout says gets fewer than 10 percent of its cash players over to Fast Fold games.
With the help of Go Fast, Winamax moved from 11th to 8th in PokerScout’s rankings.
At first glance, it may not seem like a big deal to have significant traffic from “regular” cash game tables migrating over to Fast Fold tables, but it does benefit the poker room. Because many more hands are dealt per hour at Fast Fold tables than at regular tables, the poker room, in turn, generates more rake per hour. For an example of the effect Fast Fold can have, let’s go back to a PokerScout report from March 2012. During the week for which the report was written, PokerStars’ cash game traffic was down just over one percent. At the same time, though, 25 percent of the site’s cash game players were playing on Zoom Poker tables (PokerStars’ Fast Fold games). PokerScout estimated Zoom Poker hands to be dealt three times as fast as regular hands, meaning that over half of the site’s cash game hands were being dealt at the Zoom Poker tables. PokerScout also logically estimated that because of the increase in hand rate, one Zoom Poker player equaled three regular cash game players. Therefore, when looking at the “virtual” gain in cash game players, PokerStars traffic was actually up 50 percent.
Perhaps interestingly, 888poker, the second largest poker room in PokerScout’s rankings, has not seen the kind of success with its Fast Fold offering, Snap Poker, that Winamax and other rooms have seen with theirs. Snap Poker accounts for only about 10 percent of the site’s cash game players, putting it near the back of the pack in the industry. 888 did help itself during the spring with some Snap Poker promotions which lifted the participation rate from 5 percent to 13 percent, but once the promotions ended, so did the participation growth.
