Top Gambling News: Ultimate Poker Growth Stagnant, PokerStars Boosts Growth

These are the top gambling news stories here at Gambling911.com Wednesday June 19, 2013 (early morning hours Eastern Standard Time). Follow us on Twitter here.

*Is There a Ceiling for Online Poker Growth in Nevada? – One of the biggest concerns regarding legalization of Internet poker on a state-by-state basis centered on the limited intrastate player pool for most states.

Nevada, the first state to legalize real money online poker, can already be used as a test case.

With a population hovering just over $3 million, the Silver State can hardly sustain a single Web card room let alone the nearly two dozen that have applied for licensing.

Ultimate Poker is the first and only online poker site to launch in the state for real money play.  While the Stations Casinos backed brand enjoys peak player activity just shy of 500 on occasion, according to traffic monitoring site PokerScout.com, it has just barely cracked the 200 mark in terms of average weekly players during its one month existence. 

This average has remained constant over the past two weeks.

And things could get worse before they get any better as the World Series of Poker website plans to launch its “for money play” site some time this summer. 

*PokerStars Helps to Propel Sector Growth – With its 100 Billionth Hand promotion last week, PokerStars managed to help the online poker sector grow a whopping 9 percent compared to this same period last year.  The chart above demonstrates what transpired leading up to the dealing of the 100 billionth hand (a la PokerScout.com). 
From PokerScout.com:

PokerStars traffic soared during the 100 billionth hand celebration, but where did the players come from? Indications are that they came mainly from within PokerStars, many of them drawn from games that did not qualify for the promotion, while other players just expanded their volume of play. Although ring game traffic rose more than 50%, the number of hands dealt per hour climbed only about 20% as liquidity in Zoom Poker, sit-and-gos and scheduled tournaments dropped significantly.