The past two to three years have seen an immense decrease in the field of online poker games. This has been there due to the implementation of The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 issued by an Act of Congress by the American government which made many US citizens unable to continue playing online. This has lead to the closing up of many poker sites and networks which has affected their economy to a very vast range. Many smaller European poker sites soon realized that they could not survive without their American players and switched from dying networks to Ipoker. Ipoker has grown in the last couple of years from one of the smaller networks to the 3rd biggest network with an average of just under 10,000 cash players at peak European time. The Poker Stars and the Full Tilt are some of the other biggest networks which still continue to give the benefit of online casinos to the people. Poker Stars has an amazing 37,000 cash players at peak time where as full Tilt has 16,000.



It is expected that these poker networks would merge to achieve the combined profits.

It has been observed that the merge network has struggled a lot to establish itself and still has the capacity of attracting only 300 or so cash player at peak times.

Among a large number of networks two of the networks that seem to be well established are Betfair and PKR. Betfair is mainly a betting exchange but has successfully branched out in to poker and is now established. On the other hand, PKR has done even better although many suggested that PKR with its 3d client would not succeed. Even with cutting edge 3D graphics that reduce the amount of tables a player can play to 4, PKR is climbing the rankings and seems to have a very good future. Other sites have also tried to compete with PKR for a share of the 3d poker market but have failed simply because the PKR 3D interface is so good that no other network can even think of taking its place.