PokerScout.com published its Weekly Online Poker Traffic Update on Saturday, reporting that for the third straight week, internet poker cash game traffic declined. The 3 percent drop seemed to be the responsibility of just about everyone, as out of the top ten networks and sites in PokerScout’s cash game rankings, nine of them saw their traffic fall. Total cash game liquidity is down 12 percent from the same time last year.
PokerStars is in the top spot, as usual, but its current seven day average of 17,000 cash game players is significantly lower than the more than 20,000 that the number was sitting at not all that long ago.888poker is a distant second with 2,200 cash game players, but it might be a consolation for 888 to realize that it is the only other site aside from PokerStars with more than 2,000 cash game players. The iPoker Network and Bodog are tied for third with 1,600 cash game players, and PokerStars.it and Full Tilt Poker are tied for fifth with 1,300.
It is difficult to determine exactly why online poker cash game traffic has declined so much, not just in the past year (nearing its lowest levels since 2007, not long after most poker rooms left the U.S. market after UIGEA passed), but in the past several years, but PokerScout has an interesting observation. PokerScout noted that one big difference between the current online poker industry and its past iterations is the existence of Lottery Sit-and-Go’s.
For the uninitiated, Lottery Sit-and-Go’s are three-handed, hyper-turbo single-table tournaments in which – most of the time – the winner takes the entire prize pool. Aside from the general structure, the biggest difference between these and ordinary Sit-and-Go’s is that the prize pool is only revealed seconds before the game starts. Most of the time, it will be just twice the buy-in, but depending on the site, it can escalate to 1,000 or 2,000 times the prize pool. It is all determined randomly, based on preset probabilities.
The combination of the speed of the tournaments (which, in turn, tends to narrow – but not eliminated – the gap between skilled and casual players) and the chance to win big has caused players to flock to the games. And it is not just tournament players that have been playing Lottery Sit-and-Go’s; cash game players have been making the switch. PokerScout notes that five of the top ten rooms and networks have added Lottery Sit-and-Go’s within the past year, a group of rooms that make up 50 percent of the market. PokerScout estimates, based on how much traffic has shifted from cash games to Lottery Sit-and-Go’s on PokerStars, that these new games have caused a 5 to 7 percent of the decrease in cash game traffic. Thus, PokerScout figures that the real decline in cash game traffic has only been about 5 percent since last April, which is actually the best performance year-over-year since 2010.
Of course, PokerScout only tracks cash game traffic. Tournament traffic may be down across the board, as well, or, if Lottery Sit-and-Go’s are an indication, may actually be up.
