Online Poker Continues to Grow in 2009
Monday, April 13th, 2009
Even though the current recession is affecting the land based casinos it seems that the online poker rooms are not being affected, at least not in a negative way. According to the numbers at PokerScout.com online poker is continuing to grow by about 30% per year. Not all of the poker rooms on the internet are doing great though, there are a couple of big rooms that are starting to see their numbers drop but this is most probably not due to the recession.
The biggest poker room is still PokerStars who recently celebrated getting their 20th Millionth customer and they are growing more and more for each day. They are now also allowed to accept players coming from Italy on their Italian site PokerStars.it.
FullTilt Poker is the second largest poker room and they are also growing on a daily basis just like the Cake Poker Network and the Entraction Network. Entraction has grown a lot lately and this is mainly due to the fact that the poker rooms that were banned from the iPoker Network, NoIQPoker.com and CarlosPoker.com moved over to Entraction. Cake Poker is growing a lot since they have taken over all the poker rooms from the old Gold Chip Network that is no longer around. But it has to be said that Cake Poker are probably also growing due to the fact that they are offering some really innovative promotions with their Gold Card system at Cake Poker and Gold Chip Rewards.
On the losing side of things we find poker rooms like Bodog Poker, Everest Poker and Betfair Poker. Bodog Poker is the biggest loser on the list and this is probably due to the fact that they have been having a lot of problems paying their US customers as they have had their bank accounts in the US confiscated several times. It also didn’t help that they lost a law suit involving their domain name and had to change it from Bodog.com to NewBodog.com and finally to BodogLife.com which is their current name.
If you take a look at the list of winners from the last week FullTilt Poker is the biggest winner when it comes to player traffic. Last Sunday they broke their own record when they hit 18.565 players sitting at the cash game tables at the same time. Even the IPN Network (Boss Media) had a good week and managed to break their old record when they had 4509 players playing at the same time at the cash game tables.
It will be interesting to see if the recession will ever get to online poker or if it will keep on going strong. It has been a couple of years now that people have been saying that the interest for online poker will die out but it has yet to happen.
