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Playing Poker online in 2011

admin — Sat, 14 May 2011 09:22:08 +0000

The online poker scene underwent a massive change in mid April when the largest online poker sites stopped accepting players from America. This was on foot of the US Government action against their websites and payment processors, which is an ongoing case.

The end result was a large number of US players no longer being able to play online poker. And the fallout from that is a much changed poker landscape. While there were probably a higher percentage of professional grinders in the American segment of the market, the loss of the entire US poker playing population has had a big impact on the online economy.

Even so, this event was not as disastrous as it might once have been. Following the UIGEA in 2006 many top poker sites made a big effort to target European players and that effort paid off. As we see in 2011, the removal of the Americans from the poker market had a net effect of reducing the population by about 18%.

While bad, this was nowhere near as bad as it might have been. It remains to be seen what will happen next.

Merge Network to gain more players

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:02:36 +0000

It has been reported in some online poker forums that a number of poker skins on the Cake Network are planning to change to the Merge Network within the next month or two.

The rooms in question include PlayerOnly Poker, and SportsBook poker.

I couldn’t really say what this will mean for the Cake network, though losing those skins and their players surely can’t be a good thing. And that is exactly what it is for the Merge Network. Not only is it good news, it’s great news.

The Merge software is outstanding in my opinion. The biggest drawback about this network has always been the low player numbers, and the attendant difficulty in getting a game at your preferred stakes.

But with the influx of players from the newly added skins, the traffic numbers should explode. So ok it won’t be as big as Poker Stars just yet, but it will make getting a game a whole lot easier. And this should make Merge a serious competitor and top ten network real quick.

The biggest room on the Merge network is Carbon Poker which is one of the original rooms from before it became a big network. While I never really liked the name too much, Carbon is by far the best room on the network in terms of promotions.

Problems at Pitbull Poker

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:52:58 +0000

Pitbull Poker, the only flash poker room, has run into some problems recently and it seems that the issue is not going to go away.

Initially reported on the 2+2 poker forum in July, a Pitbull poker player aired his suspicions of ‘superuser’ accounts operating on the Pitbull site.

Over time, and with contributions from other forum members, the list of problems has grown with the addition of, among other things, suspected security concerns with the Pitbull software.

Pitbull Poker has not responded to the satisfaction of the players so far. Until they do respond it seems this issue will not go away.

Read the thread on the 2+2 forum here