A look at PokerScout’s online cash game traffic ranking shows, surprising as it may seem to many, that PokerStars’ .pt website has climbed to second place, standing below PokerStars’ global website and above 888poker’s .com website.
The world’s largest online poker room went live in the segregated Portuguese market on November 29, shortly after being granted a license by the local gambling regulator – Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos (SRIJ).
Judging by data provided by PokerScout, the .pt online poker site was launched with flying colors. Over the past several days, the number of Portuguese online cash game players stood at around 2,000, more than in any other ring-fenced jurisdiction PokerStars is currently operating in. What is more, at the time this article was produced, there were 43,020 players online on the Portuguese online poker website, of whom 339 were playing cash games.
To demonstrate how massive the interest in regulated online poker has turned out to be in Portugal, it is probably a good idea to compare PokerStars’ .pt website with those in other European ring-fenced markets, namely France, Italy, and Spain, where the poker brand has been operating for some time now.
Over the past seven days, PokerStars’ Italian website has seen an average of 950 online cash game players. In Spain, there was an average of 850 online cash game players, and the number of such players averaged 650 in France. In other words, the three countries combined had just a little more players than Portugal alone. It is also important to note that any of the three countries is significantly larger than Portugal in terms of population. Italy, France, and Spain have combined population of around 173 million. Portugal has a population of just a little over 10 million.
PokerStars’ success in the southern European country should not be seen as such a big surprise. Portugal’s regulated market is a young one; new regulations were introduced a little more than a year ago and it was not until May 2016 that SRIJ started issuing online licenses.
What is more, the online operator is the only one to be offering poker in the local market, at least for now. And Portugal’s gambling regulator has been taking its time, granting licenses only every once in a while. This means that PokerStars may remain the sole online poker operator in the country for months.
In other words, figures on PokerScout will probably change once the initial interest wears off and once other major online poker brands enter the Portuguese market, and it will certainly attract other major online poker brands.
PokerStars’ initial success in Portugal also could be said to be indicative of a demand for regulated online poker. It is yet to be seen whether local regulations will keep encouraging players in the way they have been encouraged over the first days of the country’s regulated online poker era.
