WSOP.com takes a small bit out of Ultimate Poker traffic

The poker industry is clamoring to see what affect the launch if the WSOP.com online poker site will have on the Nevada market, and whether it will simply poach players from rival Ultimate Poker, or will it bring their own player base into the mix.

Of course, it should be noted that we are only a week into the WSOP.com experiment, so the numbers aren’t going to give us much in the way of concrete data. Still, we can start to see one particular trend, which is an increase in the overall player base from Nevada.

So far, after the WSOP.com launch the traffic at Ultimate Poker is well within what would be considered the standard deviation for the site, while WSOP.com traffic has been up-and-down over its first week according to the traffic tracking website www.pokerscout.com.

As you can see in the chart below, Ultimate Poker traffic has seen a relatively small decline since the launch of WSOP.com, but it doesn’t appear that the WSOP.com’s current player base is made up of all that many former Ultimate Poker patrons (evidenced by the WSOP.com traffic numbers from pokerscout.com found below:

Ultimate Poker Week-by-Week Peak Traffic Comparison

*BOLD signifies traffic numbers after wsop.com launch*

WSOP.com Peak Traffic Numbers

• September 17: 29
• September 18: 35
• September 19: 113
• September 20: 102
• September 21: 77
• September 22: 152

So what does all of this mean? It’s probably too early to tell, but it would appear that there are plenty of Nevada online poker players sitting on the sidelines. Perhaps they are waiting for a specific to launch before signing up, or perhaps they are just waiting to see how the market shakes out over the coming months.

If Nevada can get up to the proposed 1% participation rate (which is considered the industry standard for gauging prospective traffic numbers), what we are witnessing now is about 50% of the potential online traffic numbers the state is capable of.

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