Page 74 - Casino City's iGaming Pocket Directory - 2013 Edition

72 Sponsored by Casino City’s iGaming Pocket Directory
PokerStars controls about 45% of the dot-com poker market. And that market share
is likely to increase with the return of Full Tilt Poker, which it acquired in 2012. That
leaves several companies fighting for the rest of the market. And the competition is
fierce, with no one network snagging more than 10% of the markets. Operators and
networks use affiliates and rakeback schemes to aggressively seek out players and
bring them into the fold. But they’re struggling to increase market share.
According to Bodog and bwin.party, one of the key problems with the current poker
ecology is that there are not enough casual players. Bodog tried to address that by
making players anonymous at the table. Of course, it didn’t work out so well for them
in Europe, and they announced they were withdrawing their poker product from the
European market in October of 2012.
In its Half-Year Results Presentation, bwin.party said it needed to “rebalance [the]
player pool in favor of more casual players.” Part of the plan to make that happen was
removing nosebleed tables, reformulating bonus offers to favor recreational players,
improving the lobby for casual players and an effort to “protect recreational players
from ‘fish hunting.’”
Why this emphasis on casual players? It’s pretty simple, really. If player pools are filled
with a high percentage of skilled players, they’ll eventually go away because it’s too
hard to make money against other skilled players. And casual players will lose their
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