- Party and FTP tied for second place in seven-day average for cash game activity.
- Traffic suffers in the regulated markets of France, Italy and Spain.
PartyPoker and Full Tilt are neck and neck for second place, according to the latest seven-day average cash game player numbers from PokerScout.
Poker players might just have found PartyPoker’s recent $10k giveaway freeroll promotion more attractive then Full Tilt’s 1 UP MTTs. Or maybe it was just better marketing, or PokerScout’s upwards adjustment of their PLO numbers, but whatever the reason, Full Tilt numbers fell 13% over the week while Party moved up 3%.
Taking a bigger picture look at the 30 day moving average for peak players shows Full Tilt to be maintaining a 15% – 20% lead. The momentum is all with PartyPoker though; Full Tilt may have found its plateau but it now needs a growth strategy to keep its second place safe.
That 13% reduction was the largest notable dot.com fall this week. Ongame fell by 11% putting it down 60% over the last year as its bwin.party players moved over the main PartyPoker site.
PokerStars serenely continues its dominant position slipping 1% on the week. iPoker was up 4% following the new Betfair launch, but it will need to pick up another 25% before it becomes competitive with FT and Party.
The French, Italian and Spanish nationally regulated market leaders all saw their numbers fall. In Italy, International network sites Lottomatica.it and Totosi.it gave up all the gains they had made over Christmas, dropping a monster 34%.
PartyPoker.it fell even further, down 36% with a seven day average cash game player count of just 16 players according to PokerScout. At the time of writing, PokerScout was showing just two cash game players on Party’s Italian site. The Italians could do with some of whatever magic bwin.Party is using to make the .Com site competitive.
