Many Sites; Few Networks
Many online poker rooms are members of the same poker "networks". There are sometimes fifty or more poker rooms at separate web addresses, all on a single network sharing the same servers. When a player logs into one member poker room, he or she is actually playing with people who have logged in from any number of the other member sites. Often players do not even realize this.
Since each of the member poker rooms adopt the entire network's player numbers as their own, we only need to monitor one representative poker room for each of the poker networks to get accurate player and table counts for all of that network's affiliated sites. To avoid any duplication or double counting, we include only one representative poker room for each of the poker networks. Indeed, if we included more than one poker site from a network it would be misleading.
Also, if the poker room we list is a member of a poker network, we include a link to that network's web site in the "comment" column of the table version of our "current report" so visitors can go there to see all of the other poker rooms it includes. Thus, if you don't see a poker site listed, it is probably part of a network, and we are listing a different poker site from that network in our reports.
Balance Matters
We do not try to cover all the very tiny poker sites that have cropped up on the Internet. Trying to do so would be impractical, as there are simply too many, and they are constantly changing names and locations. Also, we don't think it would be in our visitor's best interest to cover them since they have a greater chance of being unsafe and they seldom offer a decent playing experience.
By covering poker rooms and poker networks having at least 1,000 regular players, we feel we are striking the right balances among completeness, safety and relevance. We also limit coverage to only poker sites that publicly report their player counts; so all our numbers are verifiable and transparent.
Nevertheless, even with these limitations we estimate that our reports effectively cover more than 95% of all online poker player traffic by monitoring the 7 key online poker rooms included in our reports.
Thank you for your interest.
Dave Dale
Online Poker... Does Size Matter?
Press Release, April 28, 2006
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