PartyPoker decided to remove their cash game tables higher than $5/10 No Limit and 30/60 in case of Fixed Limit games. They reason that the decision was made in order to make improvements to their poker ecology. PartyPoker released the following statement to the poker news site Pokerfuse:
"We have removed some of our super high stake games, this decision has been taken to make improvements to our poker ecology and in our players best interests. We believe this change will improve the action at our tables and is in the best interest of the poker room as a whole."
Players were not notified prior to the changes going live; high stakes cash games disappeared from the lobby with the latest software update. Even though the high stakes filter is still available in the lobby, no tables pop up on the activation of the filter. The SNG and MTT offerings were not affected.
The decision must clearly be in connection with PartyPoker’s recent drop in traffic. The room’s traffic experienced a shocking 50% decrease from the same period of last year. Of course such a change is a general tendency amongst poker rooms, the biggest rivals of PartyPoker also experienced a significant decrease, iPoker 35%, Ongame 22%, PokerStars 12%.
The serious blow to PartyPoker’s popularity can be due to the fact that they still haven’t rolled out a high speed game such as PokerStars’ Zoom poker or Terminal Poker’s tables, or Unibet’s Fast Poker, and the highly anticipated merger with bwin’s player pool also didn’t happen yet.
PartyPoker held its second position on the market for quite some time, but now they are only third after PokerStars and iPoker according to PokerScout. Naturally, it’s still a great position for the room, but they might be able stop the drastic decrease of traffic with the introduction of a fast game and a few tweaks to their services.
