The iPoker Network, the second largest online poker room(s) in online poker, is about to get even larger if the current rumors about them absorbing a fairly large independent online poker room, Everest Poker, are true. The move has not been made official at this point, and no timetable has been announced, but it appears the deal is all but done.

I first caught wind of the news that Everest Poker was joining the iPoker Network early last week when Twitter rumors started circulating, and sure enough by the end of the week PokerFuse had broken the story, and soon thereafter a number of other outlets were following suit.

Everest Poker was one of the very few independent online poker rooms remaining in the industry, but the French-based online poker room took a big hit when their player base was virtually cut in half after France legalized online poker but only for their own residents. This forced Everest Poker, which had a healthy player base, to have to separate their French players from their Rest of the World players, leaving them with two sparsely populated poker rooms instead of a single room with decent traffic.

Everest continued to make a go of it, but players slowly migrated to larger rooms, which in turn made Everest even less-appealing and the other rooms more appealing, until there was just no was the site would be able to rebound or even sustain their traffic numbers.

The move will see Everest Poker players combined with the largest online poker network iPoker, with the influx of players from Everest securing the #2 spot behind PokerStars for iPoker (which has been locked in a battle with Party Poker for that honor), and at the same time see a huge increase in traffic for Everest Poker players.

iPoker is in the midst of segregating it’s network into two separate tiers. Both tiers will share most of the network’s tables, so traffic will not be overly affected, but only certain rooms that meet iPoker’s criterion for inclusion will have access to certain tables –Everest Poker has a good shot of making it into the top tier from the get go with their strong traffic numbers. In addition to overall traffic sites in the top tier will have to surpass iPoker’s standards for new players and recreational players.

So EverestPoker.com will join iPoker.com’s network, adding their average of 560 cash-game players to iPoker’s 2,700, while EverestPoker.fr will add their 650 cash-game players to the burgeoning iPoker.fr network. All-in-all, this appears to be a terrific merger for both networks, as iPoker immediately takes over the #3 spot in France and boosts their worldwide traffic by roughly 20%.

Tags: Criterion, Current, Decent Traffic, France, French Players, Inclusion, Influx, iPoker Network, Midst, Online Poker Rooms, Party Poker, Poker Network, poker players, Poker Room, PokerStars, Rest Of The World, Single Room, Tiers, Timetable, Traffic Numbers

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2012 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Poker 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.