Global online poker traffic has declined a full 18% when compared to last year's numbers. The drop is largely due to the closure of two of the market's biggest players, Full Tilt Poker and UB Poker/Absolute Poker.

Global online poker traffic has declined a full 18% since this time last year, a new report from poker traffic tracking site Pokerscout reveals.

The weekly rankings from the tracking site showed that last week, online poker traffic dropped by 0.9%, marking the sixth consecutive week with declining traffic numbers worldwide.

As for year-over-year numbers, global online poker traffic has dropped 18% since June last year, mainly due to the closure of two of the world's biggest poker rooms at that time, Full Tilt Poker and UB Poker/Absolute Poker.

Full Tilt Poker closed for business on June 29th last year, while UB Poker/Absolute Poker is still technically up and running.

The two CEREUS sites, however, have witnessed a historically big drop in traffic since Black Friday, according to some reports causing the rooms to lose as much as 99% of their active players.

Other rooms, in turn, have experienced big gains, and most notably Revolution Gaming, who shot up 72%, and 888poker, up 16%.

The biggest losers apart from Full Tilt Poker and the two CEREUS rooms were the International Poker Network, which has lost 51% of its traffic, PKR, down 34%, and Merge, down 13%.

Meanwhile, PokerStars continues to rule the online poker market as the world's largest online poker room in terms of active players. The site's two subdomains PokerStars.es and PokerStars.fr are also ranked in the top-ten.

The most recent top-ten has also seen Merge Gaming recapture the tenth place from rival Revolution Gaming, led by Lock Poker.

Lock Poker earlier this month broke free from Merge to form Revolution Gaming and quickly overtook many of Merge's former players. After the dust has settled,however, Merge has now once again overtaken Revolution, pushing the new network into 12th place overall.

Source: Poker.org