Online Poker Industry Report July 30, 2008

Another stagnant week in online poker.  The entire market was about break-even with last week.  Rooms of note are Party who was up almost 22% on the back of several promotions all hitting at the same time.  Everest retreated from last week’s big pop.  More or less those that were down this week were up for last week and those that were up are down this week. Pretty much what you expect during the middle of a summer with good weather and lots of new and casual players opting to spend the time outside rather than sit behind a computer screen.

numbers 

Source PokerSiteScout

The big Sunday tournaments turned out pretty much as expected with rooms either regularly exceeding their guarantee or those that miss missing by relatively small amounts.  Stars stood out this week by hitting the $1,000,000 prize pool twice on Sunday when their warmup event also exceeded a million. 

PokerStars announced that they will be upping their $1,000,000 guarantee to $1,500,000 permanently.  They’ve also just released their beta black lobby theme live.

Tokwiro the parent of UB and Absolute made a statement about the cheating scandal as did the KGC.    Tokwiro says they turned over all forensic evidence to KGC and KGC has announced that they have appointed former New Jersey State Gaming Regulator, Frank Catania to oversee Tokwiro. 

Everybody seems to be announcing qualifiers for the PokerNews Cup. So far you can qualify on iPoker, Bwin, Full Tilt Poker and PokerRoom (I might be missing a few more).