Global Online Poker Market 18% Lower Than Last Year

According to the latest online cash game report, the global market is currently experiencing 18% less traffic than at the same time a year earlier. Helping to explain the dramatic decline in traffic is the fact that Full Tilt Poker had only just relaunched on November 6th, 2012, thus reintroducing millions of dollars back into the online poker community. Since then, however, many of those players would have subsequently lost their reimbursed money or simply just cashed out their remaining funds, therefore draining the online market once more of significant funds.
In addition, for the week up to December 3, 2013, online cash game player traffic declined by 2%, with Full Tilt slipping down in rankings to fourth place having lost 5% of its ring game action after its Big Bonus promotion came to a close. 888poker was the main beneficiary of Full Tilt’s decline and moved into third spot with a 2,153 seven-day average of cash game players, and just behind the iPoker Network with 2,638. Lagging behind in 5th spot, however, was PartyPoker with a seven-day average of 1,878 cash game players
Continuing to lead the way is online poker behemoth PokerStars with 22,835 cash game players, almost 10 times bigger than its nearest rival, and 2 and a half times bigger than its four biggest rivals combined.
Turning our attention to the fledgling New Jersey online poker market, the Party Borgata poker room averaged 170 cash players over the first week, representing 50% of the entire market. The initial results bode well for PartyPoker, which was the biggest online poker site in the world before the 2006 UIGEA forced the company’s exit from the USA and PokerStars to assume its place. At present, however, PokerStars has been omitted from New Jersey’s online poker market, and it could take months or years, before the poker room is ever allowed back into the US.