With PokerStars, Full Tilt poker and Absolute/UB Poker out of the picture the door has been left open for the smaller US-friendly poker sites and networks to pick up the scattered pieces that is the US online poker market. One of the networks that have really reaped the rewards of the Black Friday crackdown on the top three online poker providers to the United States has been the Merge Gaming Network.
The Merge Gaming Network is now the top online poker room/network serving the US market –pokerscout.com has them ranked 15th overall—and has seen their traffic jump from a peak of 1,500 to over 2,300 according to today’s numbers… and the site has been adding about 200 real-money players per day over the past 4-5 days!
The flagship site of the Merge Gaming Network is Carbon Poker, but over the past year the network has added such notable rooms as Lock Poker, Sportsbook (AKA Play Aces Poker) and Players Only Poker –all of which have been cherry-picked from the Cake Poker Network.
Another poker room that has seen a sizable increase in traffic has been Bodog, gaining about 20% in overall traffic, and surprisingly the Cake Poker Network has seen little increase in traffic, registering only about a 10% increase in traffic according to pokerscout.com.
