Poker Stars has many reasons to celebrate the New Year after the site set up a new online traffic record. PokerStars is one of the biggest and most respectable poker sites on the net, and it reached a milestone last week when it became the first room to break the threshold of 20,000 simultaneous real money players. PokerStars.com, which had lagged behind PartyPoker before US legislation forced Party to exit for the American market, is the largest card room online. According to a media press release Poker Stars hit 20,386 real money players on December 27th.
PokerStars set a new record for online poker traffic yesterday, becoming the first poker site in history to reach 20,000 simultaneous real money ring game players as measured by PokerScout.com. This achievement was made possible in large part by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), ironically designed to curb online gambling in the US. The law, enacted in 2006, instead drove out publicly traded competitors and catapulted PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker to the top of the online poker world. In the year since the law was passed, both of the privately held poker sites have doubled in size, but PokerStars retains a better than 2 to 1 advantage over its nearest competitor.
