PokerStars claims 66% of Tilt migrants

In the 36 hours since table action suddenly ground to a halt for the 7,000 cash and 6,000 tournament players on Full Tilt’s dot.com site.

However, only 41% of players appear to have migrated to another major platform over the first 36 hours, with 59% of the 13,000 players on Tilt at the time of the shutdown yet to appear on other sites according to the Manchester-based gambling data business. H2 said: “This is likely due to players being unable to withdraw balances from Tilt and some lack of confidence in playing online poker in the current climate." PokerStars however picked up 27% of the 41% of Fult Tilt player traffic that did migrate to other sites following the shutdown on Wednesday (again see pie chart below) representing a dominant 66% of this migrant traffic.

As reported by the LA Times, Full Tilt has reached an agreement with “a group of European investors” and the deal “could allow US players to recover as much as US$ 150m.” However, said H2: "After even a few days offline it may be difficult for any meaningful confidence and liquidity to be restored on the site should it be launched.”

As was the case in the immediate aftermath of Black Friday, the most notable increase in traffic on the sites not affected by Wednesday’s shutdown of Full Tilt was in the low and micro play brackets. On Thursday 30 June, PokerStars’ average player numbers in the low category were up by 612 - an 11.7% increase - and 10.1% in the micro category. Over the same period, PartyPoker saw an average increase of 361 players (13.4%) in low stakes games and by 123(15.6%) in micro.

At its peak, this shift in play at low and micro levels from Tilt to rival operators and networks accounted for between 30 to 40% of Tilt’s low and micro players prior to the shutdown. Among medium stake participants, Stars experienced an average player increase of 398 (24.8%) since the shutdown, the same percentage increase as iPoker, where average players in this bracket were up by 39, and Party by 24 (7.38%). The biggest impact on a smaller poker platform was International Poker Network (IPN) with an average increase of 42 players (16% rises). The uplift across major poker sites accounted for around 65% to 75% of Tilt players in this category.

For the important high category, covering blind levels over US$15/US$30 for fixed limit and US$ 5/US$ 10 for no limit, the highest level of uplift has been seen at Stars, with average player numbers up by 18 (an increase of 9%), followed by GTECH G2 International Poker Network with average players in this bracket up by 8 (an increase on the previous week of 42.5%) and iPoker with 6.1 players (an increase of 11.6%). At best this accounts for 30 to 40% of FullTilt’s high rollers.