On Sunday, the World Cup final between Germany and Argentina played out from Brazil. Football fans from across the world tuned into the match, which – spoiler alert – saw Germany win 1-0 in extra time. As you might have guessed, many poker players, especially those in Germany and Argentina, were glued to the game. As a result, traffic on the world’s largest online poker sites took a major blow.

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According to PokerScout, if you played online cash games around 2:00pm Eastern Time on Sunday, you probably saw a few tumbleweeds at the tables: “Traffic started falling off a full hour before kickoff. By halftime, liquidity had dropped to 40% below normal. When the match went into overtime, traffic fell even further as players waited for Germany to score its lone goal against Argentina.”

Mario Gotze (pictured) scored the only goal of the game in the 113th minute, sending shockwaves through the global football community and likely resulting in a few couches being lit on fire in Germany. “After the game ended,” PokerScout said, “traffic slowly returned to normal, although probably with considerably fewer German players online than usual as they were off celebrating their team’s hard-fought victory.”

Traffic in Sunday’s MTTs was down noticeably on July 13 compared to July 6, as David Huber noted in our July 14 Tournament Review. In case you missed it, here were the attendance figures for several tournaments week-over-week:

Winamax High Roller, July 6 – 158 entrants
Winamax High Roller, July 13 –115 entrants (down 27%)

888 Mega Deep, July 6 – 546 entrants
888 Mega Deep, July 13 – 516 entrants (down 5%)

Full Tilt Sunday Major, July 6 – 707 entrants
Full Tilt Sunday Major, July 13 – 649 entrants (down 8%)

PokerStars Sunday Million, July 6 – 6,296 entrants
PokerStars Sunday Million, July 13 – 5,554 entrants (down 11%)

These numbers were in stark contrast to New Jersey, where the PartyPoker/Borgata Poker $50,000 Guaranteed Sunday Major actually gained entrants on July 13 compared to July 6, 271 to 234.

What was the overall impact that the every-four-year World Cup had on online poker traffic? According to PokerScout, the damage might not have been as brutal as you’d think: “Overall, the World Cup took an estimated 5% toll on traffic for the last month. Now that the tournament is over, we can expect to see player counts rebound at most sites.” The next World Cup takes place in 2018.

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