Lot of people have noticed that over the last two months the poker action has slowed down significantly at almost every single online poker site. According to PokerScout.com website that lists the average traffic on all the big online poker rooms and networks the traffic at PokerStars.com has for an example dropped from the average of around 35,000 real money cash game players to around 25,500 players on average playing at the same time those real money cash games. And at partypoker.com the numbers have dropped from around 5,500 to about 3,500.
As people have noticed these drops in the traffic the poker forums have become filled with threads screaming that online poker is coming to an end. We on the other hand don’t see the situation as nowhere near that serious. In fact, there are multiple reasons why the numbers simply have to be lower now than few months back. Below we list 4 of those reasons.
4 Reasons why online poker traffic has decreased:
1: Summer. For the last 4 years that I have been actively following the online poker world the traffic has decreased every single summer. When you think about it, it really makes perfect sense. Majority of the online poker players are either from North-America or from Europe, so during the winter the weather gets bad in those places and people prefer to stay inside. When the (short) summer rolls around the people will want to get the most out of it by spending considerably more time outside in the sun.
2. WSOP. At the moment Las Vegas is filled with people participating in the 2010 World Series of Poker. These people will much rather play the cash games and tournaments there than sit in their hotel room with their laptop playing online poker.
3. World Cup of Football. By far the biggest sporting event of 2010 is currently taking place in South Africa and this means that loads of potential online poker players are now glued in front of their TV-screens – as opposed to those smaller PC screens.
4. The launch of country specific poker sites. PokerStars has for an example recently launched PokerStars.fr for their French players and PokerStars.it for their Italian players. Both of these are huge countries and naturally when the players are moved from the PokerStars.com to those sites it makes a decent sized dent into the player numbers.
