Fishing for Fish

The battle for fish just became bigger; As we speak there is currently more than 500 poker rooms online some of which some stand alone like PokerStars and Full Tilt and some part of online poker networks like ipoker or Cereus (host of Ultimate Bet Poker and Absolute Poker). What this means is that a number of poker rooms that are today online are contributors of traffic (players) to a network which hosts their players on a shared platform. Poker players are being directed to the exact same pool but play at different themed tables and sign up with different poker bonus schemes depending on the offer available at the respected poker room at the time they signed up.

The rule is that the hosting network will give its guidelines of practices and from their onwards it is in reality in the particular owners of a poker skin like William Hill Poker for example to decide upon what the bonus or the rakeback where applicable is to be for its player database.

Now Fish; Fish are the term used in poker slang to best describe new poker players which can be easily beaten. Fish are poker players which provide the juice to the tables for bigger, better or older more experienced players to take away. Bigger players or players that last longer at the tables are best described by the term sharks in poker slang. Now to older players or older followers all this is old news; what is news today is that a term described as Shark to Fish ratio has been born and it’s the worst news poker skin owners have been introduced in the history of online poker after the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act in 2006.

Fish Vs Sharks

It is only reasonable for any poker player to understand that a poker skin till this day was able to survive if it had 20 – 30 sharks raking under its skin which in reality would be sucking the blood of fish coming from other poker skins belonging to the same network but coming from a different poker skin. Fish usually are traffic coming from search engines like Google often searching for terms like poker, poker games or Texas hold em online on major search engines trying to make the decision where they should experiment with online poker and join this big bad party which is currently running online.

What this means is that these natural trafficked poker players are new players and they will 90% land on a big skin or a big network that is either highly ranked on search engines or either either advertising heavily on a large online poker directory or online poker guide. Even more fish might be migrated players from online casinos which host a poker section on their site like 888.com.

Where is this conversation leading to? As smaller poker skins or poker rooms as they are widely called have been surviving till this day from their sharks rake which has been sucking the blood of fish coming from paid advertising or seo efforts of larger sister skins with higher budgets; poker networks have decided to put an end by announcing the so called Fish Vs Sharks ratio and more over the Shark to Fish ratio fine.

As mentioned above this is the worst news announced to small sites after the UIGEA since the conception of internet poker back in 1998. What all this means in everyday language is that small sites will be eventually forced to either close down, merge with bigger skins or moreover switch to becoming poker portals which will serve the needs of large poker networks.

Bad News Travel Fast; Ipoker which is the world’s 3rd largest online poker network has announced fines to small licensees that fail to deliver juice to the tables as their sharks are more or less benefiting themselves and taking advantage of the effort put in from bigger poker rooms to deliver traffic to the tables of the network.

The Fish Vs Shark ratio will more or less very soon drive any small poker skin out of business as the fine ceiling will be exceeded month after month therefore not allowing owners to acquire a profit and at the end of the day making their survival a real difficult task to carry out. Online poker rooms will in reality seek to sign up bad players and not good players in order to keep the ratio low;

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