The Online Poker Bowl?

by Aaron Angerman

So the Super Bowl has come and gone. The Cinderella Arizona Cardinals came within a couple tippy-toes of shocking the world, but would ultimately leave empty handed as Roethlisberger found Holmes in the end zone during the game´s closing seconds. The Pittsburg Steelers captured the Vince Lombardi Trophy for a record sixth time. The Cardinals are left with nightmares that will come about anytime they see 00:35 left on the clock. I´m left with a truckload of leftover Doritos, seven Mickey´s grenades and few pairs of 3D glasses my friends left lying around. Football is over.

Who am I kidding? My Seahawks had their playoff hopes were extinguished somewhere in the middle of a 44-6 shalacking waaaaay back in Week 5 at the hands of the defending champion NY Giants. After my fantasy team floundered in the opening round of the GFY League playoffs, Sundays became little more than a costly scratch to my degenerate gambling itch. Although, the South Point sports book has some 75 cent hotdogs that were worth the trip alone.

So the team that robbed my Hawks blind in SB XL topped our NFC West rival Cards in what many are calling the greatest Super Bowl ever. Yawn. But while it pains me to do so, I gotta give props to both the Steelers and Cardinals, who were definitely the cream of the NFL crop this past year. When pressed, these franchises plowed their way through competition on their way to the Super Bowl. It is what it is.

What does any of this have to do with poker?... Nothing, really. But some recent conversations at Poker Pages spawned the idea of some sort of NFL-like playoffs to settle which online poker room is taking the most names this year.

Sadly, since the UIGEA has reduced the American field to little more than a two horse race, we´ve decided it´s better to just do this NCAA-style and invite Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars to the bowl game. And while the NFL title game may not be the smoothest transition into online poker, tough. We´re going to take this opportunity to examine how the two biggest names in the online poker game faired over the last year in the Online Poker Bowl.

Kickoff

While this article will largely focus on the past year, kickoff really happened back in October of 2006. That´s when the Safe Port Act, along with the late-attached UIGEA language, passed under Dubya´s pen and into law. Party Poker was the biggest site in the world then. While sites like Tilt and Stars chose to stay and fight, Party Gaming chose to end business with U.S. customers and swiftly exited our virtual borders with their tails between their legs.

Party Poker used to flirt with 20K cash game players pre UIGEA. At that time, epokertraffic.com had Stars hovering around the 10K mark and Tilt struggling to top 5K ring players. Party Poker then chose to leave half of their customers hanging and bailed on the U.S.

Full Tilt and PokerStars then spent the rest of ´06 and all of ´07 fighting for displaced Party players. They also found themselves in the headlines.

Full Tilt found itself in the headlines as Sorel Mizzi was caught with his hand in the multi-tabling cookie jar. While the negative press continued to flow for weeks, the events were of no real fault to Full Tilt and the site left the speed bump in the rearview.

PokerStars had just watched their 2007 World Championship of Online Poker Main Event winner "The V0id" DQ´d due to some multi-accounting of his own. Runner-up "ka$ino" was then awarded the $1.3 million top prize in the biggest, and most controversial, online tourney to date.

Would scandal deal a blow to traffic levels at either site? Not hardly.

By the beginning of 2008, online traffic monitoring sites like PokerScout.com and PokerListings.com´s Market Pulse had the industry average at about 5,000 cash game players seated at one time per site. Full Tilt was watching 7,500 players or so sitting at once. PokerStars was averaging nearly twice that amount, coming in at just under a 15,000 player average. It seems as if Party Poker players had chose their sides, with the clear advantage going to Stars after the kickoff.

Meanwhile, on the felt, Team PokerStars Pro Bertrand Grospellier was taking down the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure and $2 million. Back in the states, Full Tilt was giddy as its poster boy, Phil Ivey, was crowned champ of the WPT LA Poker Classic, but the site was missing a golden opportunity as non-partisan pros, like Phil Hellmuth and Johnny Chan, dominated the Full Tilt produced Poker After Dark to start 2008. PokerStars continued to manufacture its own batch of no-name winners on the EPT, capping out at events at 600 players or more and watching the satelliters come in.

Looking to pick up speed heading into the WSOP, Team Full Tilt came up big at the tables. While Red Pros couldn´t impress at Poker After Dark, Seidel would take down WPT Borgata in April. Gus Hansen looked to be marching towards an impressive win at the WPT Championship a couple weeks later, but would fall to another "red pro", David Chui, in one of the biggest comebacks in final table history. Either way, Full Tilt was just happy to be the patch of choice.

But Stars had another trick up its sleeve. Cue the Latin American Poker Tour.

The first season of the PokerStars LAPT would consist of three events. The first two were to take place in the month of May in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and San Jose, Costa Rica, with the third and final LAPT event to hit Uruguay in August. The first two events saw a total of more than 700 players show up, creating nearly $2 million in prize money. For the people at Stars, green-lighting the second LAPT season was a no-brainer.

While neither Stars nor Tilt ponied up the big bucks to sponsor the WSOP (the center-felt rights went to Betfair Poker), Full Tilt would strike first blood in Vegas, with Tilters (Nenad Medic, David Singer and Erick Lindgren) taking home three of the first four bracelets. Team Full Tilt would pick up another bracelet, (Mike Matusow in Event 18), before PokerStars finally got off the schneid when their own poster boy, Daniel Negreanu, was the last player standing in Event 20.

Full Tilt would pull way ahead in the bracelet count after Max Pescatori, Kenny Tran, David Benyamine and a handful of other players were handed a gold bracelet while a Full Tilt patch graced their shirt front. Team PokerStars Pros Barry Greenstein, Dario Minieri and Alexandre Gomes would each capture a title before the WSOP closed up for the summer, but PokerStars had some work to do with the "November Nine" if they wanted to make up for Full Tilt´s dominating performance at the series.

And do work they did.

While the Rio All Suites Hotel & Casino was cleaning out the tournament room come mid-July, the Main Event title was still up for grabs as Harrah´s was implementing their new delayed final table idea. The result was the "November Nine". The last nine standing in the Main Event would get four months off, before returning to play for more than $9 million and the bracelet.

When the dust had settled and the sites finished their pitches for living, breathing ad space at the final table, it was PokerStars with the victory, 6-3. Over the next four months, these nine players would be exposed to a level of media attention never before seen for a poker tournament. Somewhere in the world, PokerStars big wigs were patting themselves on the back as they headed into the locker room at the half.

2nd Half

No Bruce Springsteen halftime-show crotch-slides here. We move into the 3rd quarter with PokerStars riding a 40 percent traffic lead and a ton of November Nine momentum. Full Tilt´s John Juanda would take hope the top prize at the WSOP Europe during the hiatus, but PokerStars would still be walking tall as the final table approached.

By fall, not only was the EPT capping out their Season V events, but the PokerStars Asian Pacific Poker Tour was embarking on its second journey. The five stop schedule not only hit China, Korea and the Philippines, but Australia and New Zealand as well. The Macau stop attracted 538 entrants and is the largest poker tournament ever held in Asia.

Meanwhile, online, the Full Tilt was dropping FTOPS IX and X, answering the 33 event monstrosity that was the 2008 WCOOP. The latest WCOOP handed out $35 million or so in prize money, and there would be no "The V0id" type controversy in the Main Event this time around. The last two of four FTOPS on the 2008 schedule would see $35 million in prize money combined.

Soon enough, the poker community shifted its focus back to Vegas and the November Nine experiment, where PokerStars´ wishes were answered. When Scott Montgomery had his bracelet hopes one-outered, so went the hopes of Full Tilt in the Main Event. The final four players (Ylon Schwartz, Dennis Phillips, Ivan Demidov and eventual winner, Peter Eastgate) where each rocking the Stars logo. From now on, when people see new youngest winner ever Eastgate and his bracelet, he´ll be half-smiling under his PokerStars cap.

As if their final table short-comings weren´t enough, just days later Full Tilt was slapped with a lawsuit.

The big story in November was no longer Eastgate´s historic win, it was Clonie Gowen´s sudden dismissal from Team Full Tilt and the $40 million lawsuit that followed ($40 million being 1 percent ownership in the company, valued at $4 billion). Lederer, Tiltware and Gowen will carry this feud well into 2009 as Full Tilt has already moved to dismiss the suit and Gowen responded with an amended claim just last week.

Only time will tell with that, but all of a sudden Stars was closing 2008 with a black eye of their own.

The LAPT was right in the middle of their first Nueva Vallarta, Mexico, stop when gaming officials closed up shop and sent PokerStars and their players home, leaving PokerStars a mess that hopefully refunds, a freeroll and a makeup final table will erase.

Was this the slip up that Full Tilt needed? Tilt would see its daily cash game traffic jump to the 9,000 mark and finish the year flirting with 10,000 a day. The bad news; the traffic spike was part of an overall online poker traffic spike. Their rival was now in uncharted territory as it would finish 2008 above the 20,000 player mark.

January of 2009 saw Full Tilt top the 10,000 player mark for the first time. And not only has PokerStars been averaging out at 23,000 daily players on PokerScout.com, but the site has also added the Russian Poker Tour and the Australian New Zealand Poker Tour to their empire.

Cue Santonio Holmes and the TD.

Leaving all makeshift scoring aside, it´s safe to say that while Team Full Tilt has pieced together some nice live tournament wins and the online site has seen its traffic leap to an all-time high, but PokerStars seems to have the formula right; keep feeding the fire.

While Full Tilt keeps pumping out the advertising dollars and plastering it´s marquee players on their own television programming, PokerStars keeps manufacturing new tours and filling those events up with thousands of players from their own site. They keep the money in house. If the dozens of EPT, LAPT and APPT winners who qualified online weren´t enough to legitimize the site as the place to turn a few dollars into a small fortune, they can always fall back on the fact that their satellites turned Chris Moneymaker and Greg Raymer not only into multi-millionaires, but also world champions.

Full Tilt is doing it with flash and style. They have the bigger pro names, the sexier tournament wins. They look to produce programming to highlight their brand. And while they weren´t quite able to take advantage of their TV vehicles and watched numerous non-team members earn Poker After Dark honors, a recent banning of all PokerStars players has been imposed by PokerStars muscle, citing that foreign markets are broadcasting a heavily Full Tilt branded version of the show. Could Full Tilt get a big bump in airtime in ´09?

They definitely could, but the fact remains that PokerStars is bringing in more than twice the traffic than Full Tilt, a number that can´t be ignored. Until there is a narrowing of the gap, PokerStars reigns supreme.

PokerStars is the 2008 Online Poker Bowl champion.

Now settle down. Give the winner some space. The big winner here is the online poker industry. While the UIGEA continues to cloud the game´s future, online traffic is up across the board, not just at the big two sites. Even though it has become harder to play, daily traffic continues to rise. Power in numbers.

President Obama has been in office less than a month. Saying that the President´s plate was full might be the understatement of the century, so who knows if and when the UIGEA issue will ever come into light. But couldn´t the billions in lost online gaming tax dollars do more for us than just a quick-fix stimulus for our struggling economy?

Last year, I would have told you that there was a better chance that the Arizona Cardinals would be in the Super Bowl than the UIGEA getting clarified. I guess anything is possible.