Online poker cash game traffic monitoring site PokerScout.com reported a two percent decrease in ring game activity last week. That is certainly not good. Or is it?
As PokerScout notes, though, decliners beat advancers in the top ten six to four, there were twice as many sites and networks that saw their traffic grow in the top thirty. So what is the deal here? Two percent is a pretty sharp drop for a single week. The culprit is PokerStars and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
PokerStars launched its version of the Lottery Sit-and-Go, called Spin & Go, last Monday on its dot com site after having previously been testing it out on PokerStars.es, specific to players in Spain. Apparently, it was so damn popular that it sucked away a healthy portion of PokerStars’ cash game traffic. PokerScout reports that ring game traffic fell on the world’s largest poker site a whopping nine percent; while there is no way to say with 100 percent certainty that the cash game traffic drop was because of Spin & Go, PokerScout is certain enough. It would be one hell of a coincidence otherwise.
So while the numbers look bad, they are deceiving. Players have not left PokerStars – they are simply playing in Spin & Go tournaments rather than cash games. And around the industry, numbers are up. It should come as no surprise that this happened, either. The same thing happened to French site Winamax.fr when it debuted the first Lottery Sit-and-Go, Expresso Poker, last July. According to PokerScout, cash game traffic dropped 15 to 20 percent because of the new offering and took several weeks to finally pull back up to its pre-Expresso levels.
But why are Spin & Go games so popular? For one, it is the speed. The games are three-handed, hyper-turbo Sit-and-Go tournaments with just 500 chip starting stacks. They are over within minutes and make for an easy way to get a poker fix without committing to a longer tournament. The second is the lottery factor. Spin & Go’s are setup in such a way that players do not know what the prize pool is going to be until the tournament begins. The prize pool is usually going to be just two times the buy-in, but it can end up higher than it would be in a normal short-handed Sit-and-Go, with a very slight (VERY slight) chance to be as much as 1,000 times the buy-in. We humans are suckers for the chance at a big payday. It is like a game of chance within a game of chance. And even if we end up with the minimum prize pool ten times in a row, we’ll come back an eleventh time to see if we can hit it big, or at least bigger.
Despite the drop in cash game traffic, PokerStars is still the big dog by a mile. Looking at PokerScout’s rankings, PokerStars has a seven day average of 18,000 cash game players (I remember it being 20,000 at one point last week), while 888poker is in second with just 2,400 cash game players. The iPoker Network and Full Tilt are tied for third with 1,900 and partypoker rounds out the top five with 1,500.
