Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008

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Stars, Titan traffic growing

Players are lining up for cash games, as usual, at PokerStars.

By Christopher Hunt

A quick look at a few trends taking shape in the online poker world in February, compliments of the new PL.com MarketPulse section.

Tracking and analyzing close to 20 million hands a month, the MarketPulse section is the most comprehensive statistical overview of online poker on the Web, and subsequently can provide some pretty illuminating numbers.

Case in point: cash game traffic, which, continuing a strong trend over the last few months, was dominated again by PokerStars in February.

Stars was by far and away the cash game leader again this month, with upward of 21,000 players at peak times and an 18% upswing in traffic volume overall. In total Stars averaged a massive 13,675 real-money cash players over a 24-hour period.

A distant second overall, but also experiencing a nice upswing of 9% in February, is Full Tilt Poker, which averaged 7,631 players over each 24-hour period - up from 6,976 in January.

Next-biggest increase for February goes to the leading room in the iPoker network, Titan Poker, with a 4% increase in cash game traffic bringing it to 5,252 players on average.

Also of particular interest: a significant overall rise in average traffic at both PokerStars and Full Tilt, beginning back in December 2007; both have seen a very strong jump in action, with 2-3,000 more players apiece regularly dropping in for a round at the tables.

Check out the full online traffic report here.

Other numbers of note

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% to $26.20 and the average pot at Mansion gaining 6% to $23.10; details here.

On the juiciest games front, 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% 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).

Phil Ivey: Knows how to drag big pots.

At the nosebleed stakes, Full Tilt, PokerStars and Titan hold down the top spots decidedly, dominating a large percentage of the juicy highest-stakes action.

Biggest Hold'em pot won over the last 30 days remains the massive $384,951 pot Phil Ivey took from online rival seda1 - rumored to be Beverly Hills attorney Shawn Sedaghat - at Full Tilt Feb. 19.

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

To see a full breakdown of the massive $385k pot, jump to our strategy snapshot here. Or you can check out some of the other huge pots they played in the MarketPulse biggest pots section, where you'll find the biggest Hold'em pots won online over the last day, week and month.

Related Articles:

• Glutton for punishment? seda1 back for more
• Ivey crushes seda1 for $600k
• Ivey takes three $100k pots in last week

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