Cake Poker hit hard by loss of Doyles Room

  -   February 2nd, 2011   
Posted in: Industry News

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Only a few days ago we were wondering how the Cake Poker network would be effected by Doyles Room jumping ship to the Yatahay Network … well now it seems that we know.

It was as recently as February 2010 that PokerScout.com was tracking the Cake Network as having a 7-day average of 2,250 real money players.

Well, similar figures released yesterday show that that number has now dropped significantly to just 710. The result is that a network that was once ranked as the eight largest network in online poker (and tipped to rise to rise to the very top) is now languishing in 25th spot on PokerScout’s traffic list.

Things started going wrong for Cake in March of last year when they lost the services of Lock Poker. Not much was made of this at the time, given that Lock was a relatively new poker site that didn’t have a whole lot of traffic to take with them.

However, their departure was a sign for larger rooms such as Sportsbook.com and Players Only to take their players across to the Merge Network and suddenly Cake’s traffic numbers had taken a bit of a beating.

Rather than improving though, things got worse with PokerTableRatings.com revealing that they had been able to crack the security encryption in the Cake software. Such revelations left players all over the world wondering whether they could play poker fairly on the Cake network or whether they were being scammed by players with the technical know-how to manipulate the software.

Despite hastily releasing patches to fix this problem, the security issue had Cake on its knees and things weren’t helped when Cardroom Manager Lee Jones and Tournament Director had a disagreement over “strategic decisions.” Both ended up resigning their positions.

The introduction of both Victory Poker and Unabomber poker to the network could be described as the only highlights of a horrible last year for Cake. However, neither of these rooms had the same sort of traffic that Doyles did and their departure must have the powers that be over at Victory Poker wondering whether they should be looking for a new home too.

It’s a real shame to see Cake Poker sink as quickly as they have, and there’s no doubting that something major needs to be done over the course of the next few months, if this network is to continue to remain active.

It serves are a reminder to everyone though how quickly your fortunes can change in the world of online poker.

Tags: Cake Poker, Doyles Room, Victory Poker, Yatahay Network

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