On the first day of its relaunch, Full Tilt Poker grabbed the second most online players, despite reports of hiccups with logins and the cashier.
There were 14,773 cash players on Full Tilt at its 24-hour peak, traffic that only trailed sister site PokerStars, with 31,895 players, according to independent network traffic PokerScout.com.
At one point Tuesday, the Full Tilt client showed more than 45,000 players online, although this likely includes play money games and people connected to the client and not playing.
“Most Full Tilt players are not coming back from other sites, they’re coming back from 16 months of no online poker,” PokerScout tweeted last yesterday.
Still, most of the top sites saw a drop in traffic from a week prior, with PokerStars down 3,000 players, 888Poker down 500, iPoker down 300 and PartyPoker down 50.
Traffic numbers can be expected to be in flux over the next week, and it remains to be seen where players will choose to play once the novelty of Full Tilt’s return wears off and players move money to their site of choice. However, most analysts expect Full Tilt to retain its second-position slot.
US-facing sites had a sliver of the action on PokerStars and Full Tilt, while Full Tilt players outside the US voiced concerns about glitches during the relaunch from questions about reward status, trouble with transferring money to PokerStars, and delays in some payment processor deposits.
A week ago, Full Tilt unveiled its Edge loyalty program, in which players are assigned a status level and a percentage of rakeback based on the amount of play. Yesterday there were various reports of bonuses unavailable and the “my promotions” page was inaccessible.
Other players reported issues with deposits not being credited and later in the day players received notice of a 24-48hr processing delay due of high volume. But actual game play appeared smooth.
This message from PokerStars was posted on 2+2 Tuesday: “Please note that we are experiencing some technical difficulties with the transfer function between Full Tilt and PokerStars. There are also other issues that have been reported, which we are looking into.”
Two of Full Tilt’s pros, Gus Hansen and Viktor “Isildur1” Blom, could be found grinding nosebleed stakes. Hansen played $1k/$2k triple draw vs Alex Luneau, whilst 2-tabling $10/$20 pot-limit Omaha. Blom played 4 tables of $100/$200 deep stack heads up no-limit hold’em against Alexander “IReadYrSoul” Millar.
Tom Dwan, meanwhile, tweeted that he was in the US on the day of the relaunch and would play on the site next week.
US players can download the client and join play money games or observe real money action, but all would see “$0.00” as their real money balance in the cashier. They also can view their Full Tilt Point balance, but access to the store is blocked. US player balances are now a matter of the US Department of Justice, still to announce the appointment of its payment processor to facilitate the return of player funds.
