I was reading a piece on Bluff’s website* about the “World Series Effect” on online poker sites. Generally, during the WSOP many sites temporarily lose some of their best players who opt for live games. It’s not a huge drop off as the online poker market tends to follow the cycle below (the numbers are for illustrative purposes only – no actual data is being used here).
The graph might be slightly different for different rooms but the general idea is summer is your low season and late-fall/early-winter is your peak season. Everything else is either building up to the peak or dropping off from it.
I even received an email the other day from a concerned reader saying that Party had dropped their Sunday guarantee and he wanted to know if that meant Party was in some sort of financial trouble.
That’s just a side effect of not having some of your star tournament players online. PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker both missed their big guarantees this week.
But the WSOP may not be the only thing impacting online player numbers. Right now you have the WSOP, the World Cup, and Lakers vs. Celtics all happening. There’s a huge cross-over market between sports fans and poker players so time that poker players usually spend online might now be spent watching the World Cup or basketball.
And that’s not even counting the poker players who have gone down to South Africa to support their teams. Some sites might not just be losing them for a few hours while the game is on but for a week or more while they take a little time off.
Before anybody starts to get all teary-eyed for the poker rooms, it’s not that bad but it might provide some opportunities to get in on overlays. If the rooms have guaranteed tournaments and can’t fill the seats they still have to pay out the money which can give you a good edge. Also, many of the better players will be at the WSOP or World Cup or whatever which means that you have less sharks to get by to get in the money.
Obviously Party recognized this trend and lowered their Sunday guarantees in order to save money. Other rooms may leave them as a loss-leader. Some smaller rooms may just be so caught off guard by this whole cyclic thing they don’t know why their numbers are off š
* What’s up with Bluff Magazine’s website? That’s gotta be one of the most ill-conceived designs I’ve ever had the horror of looking at. The width of that page is over 1600 pixels. Some might say, “well, a lot of poker players have big monitors,” but not everyone has their web browsers that wide. Someone needs flogged.
@Tim: Exactly. Even Americans are starting to get into it seeing how we didn’t totally get our asses kicked so far. š
I never really thought about the player dip but that does make total sense. I can look at my own life habits at this time of year and Iām doing a hundred things other than online poker.
Forget just playing online poker – I’m not getting any work done right now because there are 3 x World Cup games to watch each day.
Two weeks tomorrow I fly to Vegas, and the first priority is finding a decent place to watch the football. I also have the nightmare situation of potentially missing England’s quarter final (should they get that far) if they don’t top the group. If they come 2nd in the group then I’ll be on a plane over the atlantic. If they win the group then they play the day before I fly, and I get to watch it down the pub.
Anyway, bottom line is, I’m not thinking at all about poker right now. I guess this is the same for many other people too.