Online Poker Industry Report July 7, 2008

A surprising bounce back this week with the market being up over 15% this week. I say surprising because the Wimbledon Finals were on Sunday and the Federer / Nadal match was absolutely fantastic. The game both of these guys brought with them to the court was one of the most inspiring moments I’ve seen in sports in a long time.

Anyway, back to poker. While Absolute halted it’s freefall from last week (down nearly 39% last week) the 1.71% bounce wasn’t very impressive where eight of the fourteen rooms being tracked showed gains of over 10%. But at least they stayed in positive territory which is better than can be said for Microgaming (down 6.18%).

industry-overview

Source PokerSiteScout

Despite the good news in the cash game numbers the big Sunday guarantees didn’t fair as well. Party ($25,600 overlay), Tilt ($21,200 overlay), iPoker ($32,000 overlay), and UB ($28,800 overlay) all had overlays with Stars being the only site that made their guarantee ($426,200 over).

Stars announced their 2X promotion. Details are a little sketchy but they promise to give more information.

Annie Duke spoke with PokerNews.com and discussed the whole UB scandal and why she’s more proud than ever to have her name associated with the room. You have to expert her to put a spin on things but I think she makes a convincing case.

But with the good comes the bad and Eric “Rizen” Lynch who only recently signed on to represent UB announced on his blog that he has decided to no longer will have any association with them. From the sound of things it has nothing to do with the UB scandal or anything like that but has more to do with being unhappy with how UB was going to use him to promote their room.

Other than that things are pretty quiet as we lumber through the summer doldrums when people go off on vacation and online site traffic generally falls off a bit.