An Answer to My Critics
Recently a few people have come out shooting at my previous post about the state of the state of online poker. The point both Dragonystic and It's Always an Off Deuce dispute is whether…
Recently a few people have come out shooting at my previous post about the state of the state of online poker. The point both Dragonystic and It’s Always an Off Deuce dispute is whether or not the online poker market is larger or smaller than it was in the past.
Now, before I get into the numbers, I’ve noticed that they’ve used the entire poker universe of US facing rooms and non-US facing rooms to prove that what I’ve said is wrong. However, I believe this to be an unfair comparison because as I said in my post:
Of course, I’ve always looked at this from US facing perspective so take all of the above I’ve said and run it through that filter. Many non-US facing rooms are doing quite well. Some never had a US presence and are still growing at a good rate while others pulled out of the US market and have begun to stabilize and grow again.
So, I tried to make it very clear that I was speaking about US-facing poker rooms yet they’ve all pulled numbers including both US and non-US rooms to make their case.
So, let’s just look at US only numbers. I’ve taken two time periods and done a three day average of numbers. I used Jan 1, 2, and 3 for the baseline pre-Neteller numbers and May 10, 11, and 12 for the comparison. Now, I did pick the May numbers for a reason. PokerStars’ recent 10 billion hand promotion shot all of their numbers to abnormally high levels. I picked a three day window before the promotion as a more representative example. Seeing as how Stars’ numbers have been drifting back towards their pre-promotion norms I feel this is a fair comparison.
My data is from Poker Site Scout and I used the following poker rooms in my analysis:
PokerStars Full Tilt Poker Microgaming Ultimate Bet Bodog Absolute Cake Merge Gaming World Poker Exchange
Just a side note but Cake and Merge do not have any stats in Poker Site Scout for Jan 1, 2, or 3 so I’ve recorded them as 0 for those dates.
So, here’s the numbers:
Jan Numbers
PokerStars 16380 Full Tilt Poker 7420 Microgaming 2944 Ultimate Bet 3169 Bodog 3376 Absolute 2086 Cake 0 Merge Gaming 0 World Poker Exchange 420
Total of 35795
May Numbers
PokerStars 12475 Full Tilt Poker 7156 Microgaming 2634 Ultimate Bet 2140 Bodog 2375 Absolute 1734 Cake 895 Merge Gaming 408 World Poker Exchange 294
Total of 30111
That’s a difference of 5684 players.
But don’t just believe me, Poker Site Scout has an entire page on their site devoted to the impact of the Neteller pullout and they pretty much confirm everything I’ve said.
Now, Poker Site Scout doesn’t have the pre-Oct 13 numbers on their site anymore but even if we take the numbers being reported by It’s Always an Off Deuce my point is still valid. Because pre-Oct 13 sites like Party, Pacific, etc were US facing. So if we look at all US facing sites pre-UIGEA we have:
PokerStars 8128 PartyPoker 10263 Full Tilt Poker 3334 Ongame 4804 iPoker 5927 Microgaming 3561 Bodog 1763 UB 2013 Crypto 2286 IPN 1707 Absolute 1241 Pacific 1992 Paradise 2917 World Poker Exchange 635
I left out Action and B2B because I can’t remember if they were US facing. Either way, the grand total of peak cash game players on Oct 7th (according to It’s Always an Off Deuce) is 50,571. So, that means US poker players have lost access to 20,460 players since Oct 7.
All my data is from a public source anyone can access and I freely encourage anyone who feels I’ve manipulated the data for my own advantage to present an alternate analysis.