View From The Sky
After two consecutive weeks of increasing numbers, the worldwide online poker market experienced a fairly big dip last week, dropping by 3%, erasing the gains of the past two weeks and then some. 9 out of the top 10 poker sites declined. The year over year number also took a downturn, going from 8% last week up to 12% now. All of the top 10 poker sites kept their rankings this week once again.
New Jersey Market Tumbles Further
The top 3 poker sites in New Jersey, Party Borgata, WSOP New Jersey, and the All American Poker Network all saw declines this week. The fourth poker site in the state, Ultimate New Jersey, continues to be on life support, with an average of only 5 cash game players now.
The decline at the All American Poker Network is the most troubling, as their numbers are currently down by more than 60% from their peak in February, and are down by 30% of that in May alone, and May isn’t even finished yet.
It seems that the poker rooms there are starting to focus on attracting more higher volume skilled players over just going after recreational players, and this seems to be particularly the case with market leader Party Borgata, who expanded their VIP program to include a higher level geared toward extremely active players.
888’s Snap Poker Continues To Grow
In the midst of their current promotion looking to get more of their players to try their version of speed poker called Snap Poker, 888 continues to see success with this, and this past week saw an all time high with it, reaching 13% of their cash game traffic.
The promotion has just ended though so we will have to see how much of this momentum they can carry forward, but with this particular form of poker it is probably of significant benefit to introduce more players to it the way that this promotion has.
Poker Affiliates Receive Ultimatum From New Jersey
6 major poker affiliates who promote both New Jersey poker sites and offshore poker sites as well have received letters from state authorities in New Jersey to stop promoting these offshore poker rooms on their affiliate sites or stop promoting the New Jersey poker rooms.
In a poker market that is already struggling so much and is in decline, this move may not be a very wise one. Being forced to choose, it wouldn’t even make sense for these sites to stop promoting other poker rooms in favor of that from a single state.
There may be a workaround here, luckily for New Jersey, although the affiliate sites would have to create separate sites or sections of their site dealing with New Jersey only. We will have to see if they are willing to do this and whether or not that would even satisfy the regulators.
The objections seem to be centered around links to unapproved sites on the same web pages as links to New Jersey sites, so this might not turn out to be that big of a deal. State regulators though need to tread carefully here though as they need to appreciate the importance of these large affiliate sites to their well being.
California Moves Closer To Online Poker Deal
The progress so far in California to come to an agreement over proposed online poker bills has been painfully slow, but as time passes at least some fairly steady progress is being made.
One of the challenges in this state, perhaps the biggest one, is coming to an agreement with the Indian tribes there, and many different tribes are involved and they don’t see eye to eye on all the important issues. The efforts to try to hammer out a deal that all can agree on continues though, and one of the main coalitions appears to be closer to doing just that. The rest of the tribes need to come on board as well though so this may take some real time to iron out enough.
Poker Tracker 4 Releases Improved Version
Poker Tracker 4 just rolled out a significant update, version 4.11, which is designed to significantly improve the speed of their software, especially with user designed custom stats. The ability to customize stats is really what sets Poker Tracker 4 apart from its competition, allowing more advanced users to better tailor their tracking to what they truly want to measure, rather than having to rely on pre selected stats that appeal to the masses. So anything that improves speed will certainly be welcomed by users, especially those who like to design their own stats and will see some real improvements in how this works for them.
