Prior to Full Tilt Poker's launch date on November 6th, 2012, there was a lot of excitement throughout the poker community. After all, FTP had been the world's second largest poker room before losing their license in June of 2011, and many people were anxious to try the site again. Plus Full Tilt signed lots of top-tier high stakes players such as Viktor "Isildur1" Blom and Isaac "philivey2694" Haxton.

November 6th was definitely a success too because over 23,000 cash game players were online just two hours after the launch. And FTP continued to perform well in the days following the initial launch date. Unfortunately, the novelty of Full Tilt reopening has cooled off and things are starting to turn sour for the site.

Dramatic Decline

Before getting into the negatives, we should start off by saying that Full Tilt has returned to its lofty spot as the world's second largest poker room. For example, the iPoker network is the third biggest poker entity with a 7-day average of 2,750 cash players at any time, while FTP has a much larger 7-day average of 5,900 players. However, this is much smaller than the 12,000-15,000 players they were averaging in the first week.

Another thing worth pointing out here is that Full Tilt is quite a ways behind the industry leader, PokerStars. The latter has carried a 7-day average of 23,400 players, which is by far more than FTP.

Reasons for the Fall-Off

Now that Full Tilt's traffic has been falling, many people are starting to speculate why this is happening. The most obvious reason is that FTP opened to much publicity and excited players rushed to the site. However, now that the newness has worn off, grinders are either returning to their usual sites or just slowing down at Full Tilt Poker.

Another big reason for the decline is that Rush Poker-style games are no longer exclusive to this room. Now the fast poker variant has spread to several other sites/networks, and players have a lot of options when hoping to play quicker games.

One more suspected reason for the rapid fall is that affiliates aren't fully supporting FTP. The site's parent company - The Rational Group - chose not to honor commissions earned by old affiliates. Now this might have been totally within their right, but it also rubbed affiliates the wrong way and is likely hurting the site now. Whatever the case may be, the new Full Tilt management is hoping for a turnaround sooner rather than later.