US turbulent ROW steady in latest online poker traffic report

Other than a little bit of leapfrogging, there hasn’t been much change in the top five online poker providers according to www.pokerscout.com’s traffic numbers. On the other hand, the US market has been anything but steady. With the departure of Lock Poker from the Revolution Gaming Network, the imminent launch of online poker in New Jersey, and WSOP.com’s supplanting of UltimatePoker.com as the most-trafficked online poker room in Nevada the US poker industry is shaping up for a wild winter.

International Traffic

PokerStars still has a virtual stranglehold on the worldwide market, with nearly 10x the traffic of its closest competitors, and the battle for #2 is still between four other sites: Full Tilt Poker, the iPoker Network, the 888 Poker Network, and Party Poker.

All four sites have average traffic between 2,200 and 2,700 players according to PokerScout.com’s data, and as we’ve seen in recent months, traffic tends to bounce back and forth between these sites. Nobody has been able to separate themselves from the chase pack.

US Traffic Unregulated Sites

Like PokerStars in the International market, the unregulated market in the United States is essentially Bodog/Bovada, and then everyone else.

Bodog is the only room that has managed to keep their withdrawal times to a minimum and do so consistently, and this one aspect is enough to put them light years ahead of their competitors in the US market.

Just a year ago, you would have been laughed off the forums as a complete crackpot if you said that two of the US industry’s top providers would be the Winning Poker Network and the Chico Poker Network, but that is indeed the case in the topsy-turvy world of unregulated poker in the US.

Here is a look at how the Top US-facing sites stack-up in terms of their seven-day rolling average of cash game players according to PokerScout.com:

US Traffic Regulated Sites

In Nevada Caesars Entertainment’s and 888’s WSOP.com poker room has now surpassed Ultimate Poker in terms of overall traffic, despite spotting its competitor a six-month head-start in the market. The pokerscout.com traffic numbers are still really close (WSOP.com’s seven-day average is 129 players while Ultimate Poker’s is 115), but the trend has WSOP.com gaining and Ultimate Poker slowly leaking players.

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