Marketplus - useful information on the poker sector

02/28/2008

A new service from the respected Poker Listings.com portal is proving itself to be a useful tool for identifying trends and levels of activity in the online poker sector.

PL.com's MarketPlus tracks and analyses close to 20 million hands a month, and is arguably the most comprehensive statistical overview of online poker on the Web.

For example, in the month of February cash-game traffic continued to be dominated by PokerStars.

PokerStars was far and away the cash game leader with upwards of 21 000 players at peak times and an 18 percent upswing in traffic volume overall. In total, the giant website averaged a massive 13 675 real-money cash players over a 24-hour period.

Full Tilt Poker was the closest opposition to PokerStars, experiencing a cash game upswing of 9 percent in February and averaging 7 631 players over each 24 hour period - up from 6 976 the previous month.

The heavily promoted and Playtech-powered Titan Poker.com on the iPoker network came in at third with a 4 percent increase in cash game traffic bringing it to 5 252 players on average.

The statistics show an impressive overall rise in average traffic at both PokerStars and Full Tilt. Beginning December 2007 both have seen a very strong surge in action, with between 2 and 3 000 more players apiece regularly dropping in for a round at the tables.

The full online traffic report can be viewed here: http://www.pokerlistings.com/market-pulse/online-traffic

The average pot size (generally indicating looser or more passive games) was up at three rooms last month - Titan Poker, Mansion Poker and Party Poker. Titan and Mansion in particular experienced fairly big upswings, with the average pot at Titan growing 7 percent to $26.20 and the average pot at Mansion gaining 6 percent to $23.10.

On the juiciest games front, MarketPlus shows that Bodog Poker and Pacific Poker still lead the way in low-to-mid stakes No-Limit and Limit Hold'em. Viewed-flop percentages are still hovering around 50-54 percent for both, although pot sizes on average are much larger at Pacific, topping out at $164 in the mid-stakes games ($1/$2-$3/$6).

Full Tilt, PokerStars and Titan dominate the highest stakes top spots, delivering a large percentage of the juicy high-stakes action.

Biggest Hold'em pot won over the last 30 days remains a massive $384 951 which international ace Phil Ivey took from online rival "seda1" - rumoured to be Beverly Hills attorney Shawn Sedaghat - at Full Tilt on February 19 (see previous InfoPowa report).

The two had an epic series of high-stakes $500/$1,000 No-Limit Hold'em sessions, with seda1 decidedly taking the worst of it - especially on the 19th, when he came out a mind-noggling $600 000 lighter in the wallet. MarketPlus biggest pots section has the details.