It's time for my quarterly look at where the poker sites are going.  Obviously, the poker landscape is much different than they were a few months ago.  Here is the link from last quarter.  Pretty much as expected, FT and Stars lost about 30% of their volume.  I think they'll be okay.  Because poker is an awesome game enjoyed by probably a hundred million people (if not hundreds of millions) around the world.  And no f*cking bureaucrat is going to be able to take it down completely.  Guaranteed!

This is going to seem like eons ago, but the start of the Stars graph is where they removed the 20-50bb games.  Remember that?  O look!  They barely lost any business from increasing the table stakes.  Do you know why?  Well the obvious answer is because it's still better for the shorties to play a 50bb game than go and flip burgers.  As an aside, burger flippers apparently make like $8 an hour.  In before a whole bunch of shorties start flooding McDonald's.  Anyway, I think the bigger reason is that poker is an awesome game enjoyed by a hundred million people!  It's like how during Prohibition, people still found ways to get a drink.  Or if butt plugs are ever banned, those guys at the DoJ would still find ways of shoving stuff up their asses.  Guaranteed!

Party and ipoker (the #3 and #4 sites) haven't picked up any of the US traffic, but I think it'll just be a matter of time before someone figures out how to log in internationally.  Merge has become the site of choice among Americans who need their online poker fix.  They only picked up a fraction of the amount lost by Stars and FT, but during the US evenings they are usually the third most active site.  I think the dust is still settling.  It'll be interesting to see what the next three months hold in store for us.

[Edit: For some reason, when you click "Merge" on PokerScout, the graph for Carbon comes up.  Maybe they are using Carbon as a proxy for the whole site?]