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.
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