Missing in Action: 3,000 Online Poker Players

An interesting graph at Poker Scout, a site that tracks online poker traffic, shows the early effects of UIGEA on selected Internet poker sites, specifically: Party Poker, Poker Stars, Full Tilt Poker, and Paradise Poker.

You can see the clear drop experienced by Party Poker, which was the industry leader, but now trails Poker Stars and is running just slightly below Full Tilt Poker.

But just as interesting as the trend lines are the actual number of real money, cash game players on September 1 and again on October 17.

Back on September 1, before UIGEA was enacted, there appeared to be approximately 18,700 cash game players on these four sites. But on October 17, the total number of cash game players dropped to 15,700 — a loss of 3,000 players or 16 percent.

While some of these players might have migrated to sites other than PokerStars or Full Tilt, it’s hard to think that all of them have found cyber poker games elsewhere. I’m thinking that these are the players who simply packed up and left.

Will they return to play online again? Quien Sabe? Like so much in poker, the answer is, “It depends.”

You can see this graphic rendering of poker site traffic first hand at: http://www.pokersitescout.com/MoversGraph1.htm