On the heels of PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker officially leaving the US market on Wednesday, former players at those sites can no longer take a wait and see approach to see what happens –regardless of how the specifics play out in the cases against PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and the Cereus Poker Network the fact of the matter is these sites will no longer be serving the US market after cutting a deal with the Department of Justice on Wednesday.

That means that the US online poker players who are willing to continue to play will have to look for a new home in the shrinking US online poker market. One of the big winners over the first few days of the post-PokerStars and Full Tilt era has been the Merge Gaming Network which has seen traffic increase some 25% since the weekend according to pokerscout.com.

With typical peak traffic in the 1,300-1,600 range before “Black Friday”, the network of poker rooms that includes Carbon Poker, Lock Poker, Play Aces, and FeltStars has now been flirting with 2,000 real-money cash game players during mid-week!

Another big winner has been Bodog, who has seen players taking advantage of a Bodog referral number and other special bonus codes specifically targeted at US players as they switch to a new online poker room.

The Merge Gaming Network had been growing steadily before the recent developments in the US online poker market, and had supplanted the Cake Poker Network as the model for poker networks. The Networks 7-day average has grown from around 700 players at any given time, to 1,000 players this past week.

Statistics and traffic numbers courtesy of www.pokerscout.com

Tags: Black Friday, Cash Game, Fact Of The Matter, First Few Days, Full tilt Poker, Game Players, Gaming Network, Gaming Poker, Money Cash, Online Poker, Peak Traffic, Poker Network, poker players, Poker Room, Poker Rooms, PokerStars, Recent Developments, Referral Number, Traffic Increase, Traffic Numbers

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 6:18 am and is filed under Poker Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.