According to an alert issued by PokerScout on Tuesday, bwin‘s migration to the PartyPokerNetwork has had a profound, immediate impact. The new #2 site in the world in terms of real money ring game volume now belongs to PartyPoker, which overtook Full Tilt. PokerScout issued a “flash” that read, “Party/bwin merger complete, traffic surpasses Full Tilt.”

A PocketFives staff member logged into bwin today and was met with a software upgrade that took about three minutes to complete on a high-speed connection. The default look and feel are similar to the old bwin, but use PartyPoker’s font and layout. Our staff member observed, “Lobby looks really slick. It’s Party, but in black.”

According to PokerScout, the new PartyPoker Network experienced a 24-hour cash game player peak of 6,448, whereas Full Tilt’s 24-hour peak was 5,889. To put PartyPoker’s number in perspective, the network had exceeded a peak of 5,000 real money ring game players just three times in the first 17 days of December.

Meanwhile, the Ongame Network, which lost bwin, had a 24-hour peak of 2,184 players on Tuesday. In December, the peak number of cash game players on the Ongame Network failed to pass 3,000 just seven times prior to bwin’s exit. The network’s peak cash game traffic on Monday was down by one-third compared to the previous two Mondays.

PokerScout’s Dan Stewart told PocketFives on Tuesday that the migration of bwin to PartyPoker has had a more prolific effect than he anticipated: “It has exceeded expectations. The number of players lost by Ongame is less than the number of players gained by PartyPoker. We’re seeing the same effect as we saw with Full Tilt Poker when it re-launched, where players get excited about a new venue and a new site opening up. The same thing happens with new games like Rush Poker: you get that upward blip we’re seeing now. It’ll probably calm down over the span of a week.”

Speaking of Full Tilt, according to PokerScout, its traffic has waned rather dramatically in the month since its re-launch on November 6. The tracking site posted on Monday, “Player counts [on Full Tilt]fell 13%, the fourth consecutive week of double-digit declines after the November re-launch. Full Tilt is now down 56% from the highs.”

By the way, if you don’t have a bwin account, you can help support our online poker community by signing up for bwin through our linksor signing up for PartyPoker through our links. On either site, you can get a 100% deposit bonus up to $500. If you sign up for PartyPoker, please use the code P5S.

We’ll keep you posted on the latest right here on PocketFives.

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