We're home!  We're home!  As much fun as we had, it's always nice to get back home.  I suppose it's always a bad sign when you get home home from vacation and you wish you weren't home.  Probably means you need to consider moving.  With the flexibility of poker, why not?

I see that I've fallen to #17 in my rake race.  For those of you new to the blog, my volume motivation in recent months has been to place between #4 and #15.  Anything too close to #15 means that I risk not getting a $1,000+ rake race bonus (you have to be in the top 17), and anything in the Top 3 means I'm not spending enough time with the family.  So I pretty much need to get in some serious grinding sessions.  Also, my winnings total is pretty meager, so I want to avoid posting yet another embarrassing number on the right.  Who says shame isn't a good motivator?

POKER

I almost forgot to do my quarterly piece on online poker traffic.  For the new readers, here is a link to my last piece in May.  Below are graphs from PokerScout.  I had suggested they start putting in 1 year graphs instead of 6 month graphs.  A 1 year graph would remove some of the seasonality involved in the poker traffic.  They agreed it was a good idea, but they haven't done so yet.  My next traffic post in November should be more telling, as I will have 1 year of data.


The 6 month graphs look pretty bad for online poker - there appears to be a huge drop in player traffic.  There was a thread in the forums about it a few months ago.  While it does look bad, I think it's a little early to start thinking the sky is falling.  Currently Stars and FT are at 25K and 14K, but 9 months ago, we were at 27K and 16K (altho there was a huge spike to 19K at FT afterwards).  Still not good for sure, but since I don't have a year's worth of data yet, it's hard to say what's seasonality and what isn't.  Maybe there's a huge spike once summer vacations end and school starts.  <3 drunk degenerate college players.