Online Poker Suffers 22% Traffic Decline Since US Clampdown

On April 15th, 2011, the Department Of Justice went after PokerStars, Full Tilt and Absolute Poker’s US operations effectively putting an end to online poker Stateside.
Almost two weeks later and PokerScout have now released an online poker traffic report comparing the weekend before ‘Black Friday’ to the two subsequent weekends. The results reveal a global decline in online cash poker players of 22%.
Click here for poker sites that accept US players.
Breaking the figures down, PokerStars has seen its cash game players tail off by a massive 28% overall and Full Tilt is currently down 35% while the CEREUS Network, which includes both Absolute Poker and UB have suffered a massive
65% decline in cash game players over two weekends.
A popular misconception has been that the increase in players moving over to poker rooms still accepting American players may have helped to balance the losses of the big three absent sites.
Considering Merge Gaming Network traffic is up by 61%, Bodog up by 32% and the Cake Poker Network is up 30% it is easy to understand how this misconception could occur. However, PokerScout’s numbers show that whereas 15,831 cash game players left the “Big Three” poker sites, just 950 additional cash player were recorded playing on US-friendly poker rooms over the past two weeks.
A quick glance at PokerScout’s numbers at the time of writing will help you to fully appreciate how completely PokerStars and Full Tilt dominated the online poker market. Currently there are 24,211 cash players playing on PokerStars and 13,215 at Full Tilt, whereas the third most popular site is iPoker with 4,423 while a lowly fourth is Ongame on just 2,908.
With millions of US players now unable to play poker online and a further 50,000+ US pros currently out of a job, the prospects for online poker in America have never been this bleak. As Poker Players Alliance executive director John Pappas explains:
“The next month is going to be our month to either seize or lose. If we want our game back the PPA and PPA members, and the poker community at large, really needs to activate.”
To that end the PPA have recently launched a Take Action page enabling protesters to post comments to President Obama, Congress and the Department of Justice sites, which have already received over 70,000 e-mails and letters.