My quarterly review of PokerScout online poker traffic data continued from the last post:

2. Party Poker.  Seems to be a decent site.  I have no serious complaints - software seems okay, slightly fishy, and several hotkey packages to choose from.  The rewards are kind of chintzy tho.  I'm not sure why the unusual drop in volume over year-end.  Also, their BWIN acquisition was supposed to be integrated in Q1, but I can't tell if it's in the graph (since I never looked at Party before).  I'm going to guess not.  In this weird transitional time in the history of online poker, you can get ahead just by not doing something majorly retarded.  For example...

3. iPoker.  iPoker had planned to follow Ongame and go to a VIP rewards system where winners are penalized in favor of the fish.  The Robin Hoods of Poker - take from the skilled and give to the unskilled.  That's what you want to see in a competition of skill (like poker) - to reward the losers and the idiots.  No longer would winning regs know ahead of time what our benefits are... they have some black box spit out some number around 50% of what you were used to at you.  I just said, "Go f*ck yourself!"  If you don't want my business, you won't get it, and I immediately cashed out.  And I haven't looked back.

Unbeknownst to me, they TOOK IT BACK!!! and decided not to make that change. All they are doing is changing to weighted contributed rake next month.  If I wasn't blogging and doing some fact checking, I wouldn't have even known about it.  I'm probably not the only one, from the looks of this graph.  Shouldn't they have figured out I cashed out around the time the threads appeared on 2+2 and sent me an "OOPS - we F-ed up.  Here is some reload moneyz.  Plz come back!" email?  How does it feel to be the only site to not have had a significant gain in volume the last 6 months?!?  Idiots.  There is a seasonal increase in players playing online poker (as seen from some of the other sites) - probably a post-summer vacation/WSOP thing.  So having the same number of players in this 6 month graph is terrible.

Also their software was such crap.  You could have gotten a college software class to come up with something better.  I'm not talking about CalTech or MIT... I'm talking about the Chernobyl Community College for quadriplegics.  So they finally updated their software.  The reviews are unflattering and that seems to be a work in progress.

But maybe they deserve another look.  Maybe.

The exciting conclusion (#4-6) on Friday.