William Hill Introduces Controversial Feature, 888Poker Crushes the Market

In the course of the past week, poker rooms have provided the community with a large number of topics: William Hill launched the Poker Coach feature, 888Poker booked a record income and PokerStars keeps dominating the market.

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2013, the year of 888Poker

By far, the performance of 888Poker [4] has been the most acclaimed news of late: in Q4 2013, the room yet again showed off an increase in revenues. 888 Holdings plc booked $107 million in income in the fourth quarter of the year, a record in its history, $25 million of which coming from poker. The total annual income from poker was $94 million, $12 million more than the year before. Active player number has also risen: 16% more players were grinding in the room than in 2012.

The results of the room are all the more astonishing as most operators keep losing traffic and revenues since Black Friday. As a result, 888Poker is now runner-up on the traffic list right behind PokerStars; last week, an average of 2,700 users played at the cash game tables. The iPoker network recorded an average player number of 2,300 and Full Tilt Poker had 2,200.

PokerStars increases dominance

PokerStars [5] boasts about ten times as many players as any of its rivals on the .com market; the room has no competitors to fear. Also, PS has been performing increasingly well on the regulated markets: the .es room is now occupying the 7th position on the worldwide traffic list, besting French market leader Winamax. Most likely, PS managed to lure in a large number of players with its strong marketing campaign, spearheaded by tennis ace Rafa Nadal, a real national hero in Spain. On 31 January, Spanish users could play heads-up against him on the NL2 Zoom tables, not to mention a whole range of TV and viral ads starring Nadal.

Of the PokerStars skins, only the .fr room is not a leader of its market, having the second largest traffic behind Winamax. The latter room booked an average of 1,600 cash game players last week, while PokerStars.fr had 1,350.

William Hill introduces Poker Coach

Partner of the iPoker network, William Hill Poker [6] has recently introduced a new feature that outraged a large number of regular players. The Poker Coach is an embedded version of Magic Hold’em, a utility software first released in 2009, aimed to help beginner players in making the right decisions at the table.

At the moment, Poker Coach is available at William Hill only and it includes a preflop HUD offering VPIP, PFR and AggF stats on opponents, as well as pot odds information ant tips.

While regulars would possibly not mind the introduction of a HUD, they consider hints to make the right move plain cheating. Clearly, the room aims at keeping recreational players in the game as long as possible.