Traffic on PartyPokerseems to be no worse for wear after cash games with stakes higher than $5/$10 No Limit and Pot Limit and $30/$60 Limit were removed last week. According to PokerScout, which monitors online poker room traffic, “While the high-stakes games had some action going at most hours of the day, the number of players involved was never very large. At peak times, just a few dozen players populated the tables.”

PokerScout broke down the data: “Overall, the high-stakes games constituted just 0.6% of total player counts, so a large impact on traffic was not expected. Unsurprisingly, PartyPoker saw a decline of 0.8% for the week.”

Worldwide, PartyPoker is the third largest network in terms of cash game volume and has a seven-day running average of 2,450 real money ring game players according to PokerScout. During peak hours, well over 4,000 cash game players can be logged in. PartyPoker trails only PokerStars and the iPoker Network in terms of ring game volume and was, prior to late 2006, the largest online poker room in the world.

When addressing the decision to axe several high-stakes tables, PartyPoker officials rationalized, “[We wanted to]make improvements to our poker ecology and [the decision is] in our players’ best interests. We believe this change will improve the action at our tables and is in the best interest of the poker room as a whole.” On Two Plus Two, several posters pointed to the ratio of money won to money raked being much higher at high-stakes games compared to low-stakes games.

Year-over-year, PartyPoker’s cash game traffic is off 44%, compared to 26% for PokerStars and 36% for the iPoker Network. Several European-facing sites, including Everest Poker, PKR, and Ongame, have also all seen their cash game traffic drop by over 20% in the last year despite the loss of Full Tilt Poker, which was once the second busiest site in the land.

In our article discussing PartyPoker’s recent change to its cash game mix, one poster noted that PKR made a similar decision, but later reinstated high-stakes tables: “When this was recently done on PKR, they discovered this was indeed overall bad for the poker health of its games when people were complaining. PKR was wise enough to go back on their decision and include higher-stakes games.” Players interested in sitting at PKR’s high-stakes tables had to receive permission from site security in order to do so.

No ripple effect from PartyPoker’s high-stakes cash game table removal appears to have been felt. For the past eight days, the network has seen peak cash game player counts pass 4,000 after that number dropped as low as 3,600 on June 23. Prior to the current eight-day streak, PartyPoker’s peak cash game player counts lapped 5,000 in 9 of the previous 11 days.

Stay tuned to PocketFives for more online poker news.