It's time for my quarterly review of US  poker traffic.  I'm trying to remember if anything's changed since May... Oh yeah!  FT went busto and stole our money!  I hope Ray Bitar enjoys living outside the U.S. the rest of his life.  I have a special oak branch just for him.

Stars is no longer a US site, but I think looking at the traffic of the world's number 1 site will give a good indication of the industry.  US poker customers were about 1/3 of the market.  They seem to have made a nice recovery off the lows, even with the loss of US customers.  Seasonally adjusted, I'm not even sure if they lost any customers, because the summer is the low period in terms of online poker (see a graph from the same  period last year, where they went from 35K to 25K).  Imagine that!  When you take care of your customers' money, the strength of online poker just takes care of everything else.  Shocker.

Among the US sites, Merge is the #1 network.  And it's really the only option for mass multitabling regs.  I suppose taking 4-6 weeks for a cashout AND halting new sign-ups is going to put a damper on growth.  I hear cashouts are now only taking 3 weeks or so, but it's hard to say if that's a fluke.  And after they get flooded with new accounts when they open, it wouldn't be surprising if cashouts went back to the 4-6 week average.  Not trying to be Debbie Downer - just putting together 1 and 1.  But I think the graph is more of an indication of their self-imposed no new inflow, and not of demand.  Hopefully they will open soon, because I really like the site.

Bodog is the #2 US poker site, but they are being spun off at the end of the year.  I hear their VIP benefits suck, but I suppose when you can only play 4 tables at a time, you're going to eliminate a lot of multitabling regs, so the games must be soft enough to compensate.  I'll look into the site more when I have time.

I've been playing a little bit of Cake to see what it's all about.  My review in a later post.  I'm actually shocked that they actually had some growth, considering it takes 2 months for a cashout, and there was some issue with them refusing to pay out a high stakes player on suspicion of chip dumping.  Most of the trades I've seen on 2+2 have been for 0.5 to 0.65 cents on the dollar.  I'll have a review later, but I'm having some trouble getting past the fact that I have to use PT3 and there seem to be no full set of hotkeys that works.

I was bored last week so I put some money on there to check it out.  HUDs and mass multi-tabling are okay.  The US games have the standard rake up through NL200, but the Euro games have a max rake of 5 EUROS.  WTF?!?  The games seem somewhat soft tho and the rakeback and promos are probably a little above average.  I'll keep my eye on it, but there just aren't enough (or any) tables at the stakes I'm interested in.  But it might be worth taking a look at if you are a beginning player.