While online poker room traffic has been on an overall downward spiral over the past year, this month, the industry has seen a rise in online poker traffic for the first time in a very long time.
But why all of a sudden did this occur?
The rise has all to do with the re-opening of Full Tilt Poker on November 6, 2012. Hundreds of thousands of former customers rushed back to the site to claim their funds and many of them decided to start playing again on the software they once loved and is now under the new management of PokerStars.
Some $180 million has come back to the hands of poker players and created a momentum which actually appears to have benefitted the entire industry as a whole including competitors’ sites.
According to traffic monitoring sources, it appears that around 400,000 former Full Tilt Poker customers have re-entered the world of online poker over the past week. The site has been averaging some 6,400 simultaneous cash game players this past week after peaking at 8,900 players on Day 1 of its much anticipated relaunch and remains the second largest poker network globally, second only to big brother PokerStars.
