Online Poker Traffic Up 2% For First Week Of 2014

The last week of 2013 saw online poker traffic decrease as online poker players left the virtual felts to celebrate and welcome in the new year. Consequently, New Year’s Eve saw a dramatic 6% fall in traffic, making it amongst the slowest traffic days of the year.
However, the first week of 2014 saw online poker traffic rebound strongly and was up by a solid 2% last week overall. Out of the top ten poker rooms, just Winamax changed position, moving from eight to seventh place as PokerStars’ Spanish market site was knocked down to eighth spot.
Consequently, PokerStars continues to lead the industry with almost ten times the traffic of its nearest rivals, followed by 888poker (2,800), iPoker Network (2,600), Full Tilt Poker (2,300), and then PartyPoker (2,200).
The last week of 2013 also saw Microgaming’s MPN ousted from 10th spot to 12th after Ladbrokes abandoned the network for iPoker, but last week MPN gained a bit of ground and managed to pull a place back to tie for 11th place with Adjarabet. MPN’s positive movement may have been influenced by the Bad Beat Jackpot being hit an incredible four times over the space of just one week.
Not surprisingly the event marked the first time the BBJ was struck four times in a single week at MPN. However, it was not all down to pure luck as back in March MPN had reduced the necessary qualifying hands in order to create more winners more often.
Turning our attention to the US online poker market, New Jersey has continued to move forward and its four online poker sites recorded nearly 700 average weekly cash game players, a figure that’s almost 11% higher than the previous record set around three weeks ago.
Reporting the biggest growth in New Jersey was the All American Poker Network (AAPN), which saw a massive 33% spike in traffic last week, meaning it currently accounts for 19% of the market share. At the top continues to be Party Borgata with a 47% market share; follwed by WSOP.com (30%) and Ultimate Poker (3%).
Meanwhile, in Nevada WSOP.com leads the way with an average 110 weekly cash game players, followed close behind by Ultimate Poker with 90 players over the same seven-day period.
Finally, global online poker player traffic was 11% lower than it was on January 7th, 2013.