PokerStars has been the massive industry leader for years and years – even amid the excessive backlash they received for the changes to their VIP rewards program or the rake increase, it still seems near impossible to imagine a "dethroning" to take place. But if such an event would happen, who would take over the number one spot? Partypoker, who aggressively goes for the disappointed former Stars regs with things like their new loyalty program? Would it be 888, or maybe Unibet? Surprisingly so, the network who’s most likely to overtake Stars in player traffic according to the latest numbers, is one which may not have a single room you have even heard of, since it takes players exclusively form Asia – yet.
Asia has a few world-famous gambling "havens": the most famous one of all being Macau, the "Las Vegas of the Orient" where the likes of Tom Dwan and Paul Phua battle each other at the card tables on the highest stakes. Manila, the capital city of the Philippines hosted a stop of the HK$250,000 buy-in Triton Super High Roller Series earlier this year. But when it comes to the online version of poker, one may not think of Asia as a major player.
There are a few factors that do impede the flourishing of the Asian online gambling market. The most populous country on the continent – or, as a matter of fact, the whole world – China has very strict government control over the internet, and any form of internet gambling is also banned. No online poker rooms can be accessed from there legally. In addition to the largest country imposing a complete ban on online poker, there are many more who do the same either for religious – like Afghanistan or Yemen – or other ideological reasons – like North Korea.
But the kicker is, the market is so large, Asia is so populous that even if many countries ban online gambling, the ones that don’t – like Hong Kong or Japan -combined with the players who access gambling sites illegally from countries that do, it is still a viable online poker market with great potential.
This is how it’s possible that the number two network in terms of cash game player traffic has been IDNPoker for a long time now. IDN’s rooms include 12BetPoker, AsiaBagus, M88 and Fun88. If these are not sites you’ve ever heard of, that’s understandable since these only accept players from Asia, they’re not in the European or American market.
There’s another network, GGNetwork, who had focused exclusively on Asia until recently when they opened their servers to European traffic as well and they have done phenomenally well. They’ve cracked the top 10 and are currently 8th on PokerScout’s list ranking poker networks by player traffic. One of the appeals GG rooms like PPI poker have for European players is that their player pool tends to be much softer than on other online rooms. This is due to the fact that although more and more people play poker online in Asia, they haven’t had the "post-Moneymaker" type poker boom yet and also, poker isn’t as much engraved in their culture as it is in the West. Therefore the skill level of the players coming form there is below what you’re used to on Europe-centric sites.
However, experts are predicting a poker boom in Asia, so if that in fact comes, Asian rooms may lose that appeal. But whatever they lose in terms of player traffic for that reason they are sure to make back ten-fold with all the new users the upcoming Asia boom would bring in.
So, as we mentioned the Asian IDNPoker Network is number two in player traffic behind Stars, whether the Asian poker boom is coming or not. And that is not even the whole story though – if we take a look at the last six months’ trends, we can observe that PS has been losing player traffic while IDN grew. Stars went from 15,000 players at their cash game tables on average to 10,000 in that period of time, meanwhile, IDN went from just under 4000 to 4400. That growth is more impressive if we consider that the is a well known "rule" of the industry that traffic falls during summer months. Stars’ decline falls in line with the negative reputation they built recently among the online poker community, with actions like dismissing their Supernova VIP club and switching to a lot more chance-based rewards program while cutting back on rakeback drastically.
This is Stars chart from PokerScout for the last six months, and here’s IDN’s, so you can see them for yourself.
If the current trend of both rooms continues, and on top of that IDN decides to open up to the players outside Asia, and the Asian online poker boom does come, it may very well be that the number one spot will not be occupied by PokerStars, as we’re so used to it by now, but an online poker network headquartered in Manila, Philippines.
