Some Recent Attendance Numbers at the Top Online Tourneys

Bill Rini has a post up about the decline of paticipation numbers at some of the biggest online sites, along with a link-up to Lou Krieger, who quickly noticed that about 3,000 online players (as measured by Poker Site Scout) seemed to disappear overnight, after the UIGEA was signed into law.

Bill brought up the topic of how big the online tourneys have been in the weeks subsequent to the UIGEA's signing, and since I have some of that data, well, here 'tis. I'v been doing the weekly writeups on the Sunday tourneys for pokernews.com for several weeks now, minus some weeks when I was covering the WCOOP at Poker Stars, where I needed to focus on just that, and didn't track the other tourneys.

Well, anyhow, I've got the attendance number for the big sites excepting the one from a week back on Party, when they dropped the guarantee from $1 milion to $200,000 immediately after the UIGEA was signed. So, without further ado:

Poker Stars:

8/27: 2,425 --- this one had a $530 buy-in, up from the standard $215
9/03: 5,699
9/10: 5,375
9/17: WCOOP hiatus
9/24: WCOOP hiatus
10/01: WCOOP hiatus
10/08: 5,501
10/15: 6,157 (new weekly-event record prize pool)
10/22: 6,413 (new weekly-event record prize pool)
10/29: 2,785 (new weekly-event record prize pool) --- this one had a $530 buy-in, up from the standard $215

Full Tilt:

8/27: 1,387
9/03: 1,191
9/10: 1,217
10/08: 1,336
10/15: 1,127 --- this was a $530 buy-in monthly event; the others are $215 entries
10/22: 1,726
10/29: 1,780

Ultimate Bet:

8/27: 1,047
9/03: 937
9/10: 893
10/08: 876
10/15: 896
10/22: 863
10/29: 966

Party Poker:

8/27: 5,523
9/03: 5,084
9/10: 4,885
10/08: 4,591
10/15: $1 Million Guarantee event cancelled
10/22: approx. 900
10/29: 935

Alright, some addtional comments. UB hasn't made its guarantee since 8/27, minus the three weeks when I was off WCOOP-ing and don't have data for; I suspect they didn't make it in those weeks either. Stars and Full Tilt both change things up once a month, so those numbers are more applicable when one computes the total prize pool, and not the number of entrants. And finally, while Full Tilt's and Stars' jumps do correlate nicely with the cash-game increase as seen on Poker Site Scout, note that there is one other factor --- a lot of the big-time online players play x-number of online events on a given Sunday; for tose that play two, they've now largely moved to Full Tilt as their second event. That's related to the other, but is still an independent factor.