If you don’t already know, Gold Rush, as the name might imply, is a promotion aimed at those who play Full Tilt‘s fast-fold game, Rush Poker. Unlike many of Full Tilt’s promotions, there is no opting-in involved here. You play, you’re in. And it is really easy to understand, too – there are no leaderboards or points systems or anything like that. Whenever a player participates in a Rush Poker hand, he has a chance to win an extra prize. There are only two requirements: the player must contribute to the pot and the player pool for that game must be large enough to create two tables.

At the end of every hand, a random number generator will get to work and select players (or no players) to take a seat at a special Gold Rush table. Once there, the player will be presented with three cards, placed face down. He chooses one to reveal his prize. That’s it. Back to the Rush Poker tables.

Prizes include up to $10,000 in cash, Rush Poker ring game tickets, Full Tilt point packages, tournament tickets for Gold Rush freerolls, and tournament tickets to Gold Rush freeroll satellites.

Full Tilt Poker began the Gold Rush promotion on December 19, intending for it to only run through January 1. The promo was working out so well, though, that it was extended another week-and-a-half to January 11. Then, it was extended even further, all the way until February 1.

PokerScout, the cash game traffic monitor, in it Weekly Scouting Report, says that based on traffic data alone, the Gold Rush promotion does, in fact, look like a great success for Full Tilt. On the first day of the promotion, cash game traffic across the entire site skyrocketed an amazing 27%. Normally, one would expect things to cool off after the initial excitement of the promotion subsided, but it really didn’t.

From the third week to the fourth, says PokerScout, average cash game traffic only fell 6%. It is currently still 13% higher than what it was before Gold Rush started. That is outstanding for a promotion that is about a month old.

Naturally, because Gold Rush has been so popular, the Rush Poker tables have been more populated. Before the promotion, 38% of Full Tilt Poker’s cash game players were at Rush Poker tables. That figure eclipsed 50% when the promotion started and is still at about 45%.

PokerScout also says that even Full Tilt’s non-Rush Poker cash game traffic has benefited from Gold Rush. During the promotion, the average number of non-Rush players has been higher than 1,000 six times, whereas in the ten days prior to the promotion, the highest that number got was 993.

I agree with PokerScout’s assessment of why the promotion has been so popular. It is easy. Good players do not get rewarded any more than poor ones, there no difficult requirements to achieve, and the only advantage high volume players have is simply more chances to win. Adjarabet has employed a similar strategy of attractive promotions with no barriers to entry, a strategy which has allowed it to break into PokerScout’s top ten networks and sites, reaching as high as the top five at its peak.

PokerScout’s Scouting Report is a daily newsletter for the online poker industry, with in-depth data and analysis of the market. More information can be found by clicking here or contacting support@pokerscout.com.

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