Online Poker Traffic Down by 22% Since Black Friday

New figures have put some concrete numbers to the decrease in traffic in the online poker world since the Black Friday shutdown of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker in the United States. According to a report by PokerScout.com, online poker traffic has fallen 22% in the two weeks since the US government indicted 11 online poker executives and seized the domain names of the three largest rooms operating in the United States, with the decline due almost entirely to the inability of USA players to play on those sites.

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Of the three sites that were impacted by the US government’s actions, PokerStars seems to have taken the least damage. PokerStars remains the largest online poker room in the world, despite a 28% drop in traffic on the site.

Meanwhile, Full Tilt Poker has seen a larger decline – though perhaps not quite as drastic a drop as they may have first feared. Though FTP saw only half of its normal traffic on the weekend after Black Friday, it recovered nicely last weekend, and has suffered an overall loss of approximately 35% of its player base.

The worst hit of all was suffered by Absolute Poker and the Cereus Network. Overall, network traffic is down 65% -- a potentially crippling blow for Cereus, which drew heavily on the USA market.

On the other end of the spectrum, there appear to have been three big winners from the indictments: mainly, the three largest operators still accepting customers from the United States. The largest gains were seen by the Merge Network, which has seen traffic increase by 61% in just the last two weeks. Increases of 30% or more were also seen by Bodog Poker and the Cake Network, while traffic on the Everleaf Network was virtually unchanged.

In addition, the news seems to have had negligible impact on sites operating only outside of the United States. While the report did give figures for other large rooms such as PartyPoker, iPoker and the Ongame Network, none of these rooms had a gain or loss of as much as 10%.