Aw crap!  I didn't realize I forgot to do my PokerScout analysis the second half of last year.  How can I be that senile when I wasn't even blogging that often?  But here's the link to the same period last year (pre-Black Friday).  This time, I thought I would include my thoughts of the top 6 online poker sites (that are not country-specific sites):

1. PokerStars.  There's a reason why Stars is the leader in the industry.  They know the real money in online poker is cultivating the business of high volume customers (i.e. mass multitablers).  They don't give a shit about fish.  Because they are f*cking fish - they play their 100 hands, lose their roll, make "online poker is rigged" posts on 2+2 and they move on.  Contrary to what Zach will tell you, you can't base a rake-generating business on that kind of customer.  You want the dude that's going to play 200K hands a month, regardless of who is at the table.  And you want to give them a six figure bonus every year.  At the end of the day, poker is a competition, and Stars wants to create an environment where the best want to play.  It's not an accident that they are over 5x the size of the next largest competitor.  That is crazy in ANY industry.

Not sure why their business took a dive in October.  But I think it's something that they are over 28K now, and they were a little over 30K last February.  I thought US players were 1/3 of the market.  What Black Friday?

Sure - they recently screwed regs by going to contributed rake (from dealt).  But that was to be expected - as I've previously written when FT made the change, dealt rake is "less fair" and bad for the games.  The thing I found awesome about Stars is that they reduced rake from the industry standard of 5% to 4.5%.  This is something when most of their clownboy competitors made rake grabs the past 9 months.  I'm hopeful this will be the start of a trend - whenever the industry leader lowers prices, it can only be good for the customer.

Sadly, they are also top of the class in most things related to online poker - including security - and I'm pretty sure I can't sneak through.

I've only covered 1 of the top 6, and I'm out of time today.  I'll have to continue this in my next post.