The Merge Poker Network had quite an increase in terms of their poker traffic in the month after Black Friday hit the United States poker population. To put this statement into numbers, you can look at the 79 percent increase in their cash game poker traffic in just that month after April 15th. While the three biggest online poker sites out there found themselves in quite a bit of trouble, Full Tilt Poker is no longer running, Absolute Poker shut down, and PokerStars is the only one of the big three to be able to make it past the fall out. When online poker players in the United States were searching for places to go, the Merge Network offered them a few great options.
The Merge Network has a few well-known poker rooms under it, including Lock Poker and RPM Poker. The only issue with the fact that these sites allowed US sign-ups after Black Friday, is that they were overwhelmed with new sign-ups, and couldn’t keep up with processing the incredibly high number of payments that were coming on the site. Merge was on a two week back log of cash out requests, and found themselves having to make a decision. They decided to stop allowing new US sign-ups at this point, in order to catch up on payouts, and hopefully be able to re-open in the near future.
It seems that the Merge Network has finally caught up on their payouts, and is now accepting new US players onto most their skins. It will be interesting to see what kind of impact this will have on the poker rankings for the Merge Network, as they are currently sitting at 12th in the overall cash game traffic rankings. Their current ranking though, actually puts them at the top of all online poker sites who accept US players currently, with Bodog sitting in 13th, and the Cake Poker Network in 20th. Bodog is actually heading OUT of the US market at the end of this year, which could potentially send even more traffic to the Merge Network.