It is a bad time for online poker rooms. First the WSOP was taking up all the attention.

The good weather is keeping people out of doors. And those who are staying in are glued to the football Euro Cup, which is just entering the knockout stage or watching the NBA playoffs.

Therefore table attendance in all online poker rooms is falling.

The Sunday Million online poker event at Poker Stars had only about 6,750 entries as compared to almost 7,000 entries last week, which is down by 250. The pool prize also fell to $1,349,400. Soren “Kongsgaard” Kongsgaard, one of the luminaries of online poker won the event in grand style. Another extremely popular and usually extremely busy online poker room, Full Tilt Poker, also had a miserable attendance. The entries for their flagship event were half of those at Poker Stars. Full Tilt Poker had to chip in with $50,000 in order to maintain the guaranteed prize. “th_IN_kB4Urail” took on “JCarver” in the heads up play and won. His share of the booty was $132,788. The UltimateBet event fared no better with a downturn in attendance of 10% for the UltimateBet $200,000 event. The online poker room had to fork out $23,600 to meet the guarantee. The only online poker room where it was business as usual was Bodog Poker. For the $100,000 Guaranteed Tournament this poker room actually managed to increase the entries, although by a marginal amount. Experts are attributing this to good luck rather than any merit at Bodog poker.

Meanwhile new things have been happening at some online poker rooms.  CelebPoker has introduced the highest cash poker tables in online poker history. Stakes of  €1,500 / €3,000 have not been heard of before. The games can be played in the equivalents of other currencies as well. As the name suggests, CelebPoker is the haunt of celebrity poker players. In fact it was the world’s first celebrity online poker room. Therefore it has to be ahead of the pack. At these stakes the tables are not for the faint hearted even where celebrities are concerned. Now it remains to be seen how many takers are there for these tables.

Deal making at final tables has always been a part of live poker games. So far it has been difficult in online games because of the absence of a facilitating mechanism. Now Absolute Poker has introduced a feature that will expedite the deal making process. It will work as follows. The new Deal Making button will automatically appear only at final tables. All the players in the fray have to give consent to the deal making. Once they do this, the game will enter the pause mode and the tournament manager will join the chat in order to moderate the proceedings and to provide information on chip equity. If an agreement is arrived at, the tournament manager will divide the pot as agreed to by the players. If an agreement is not reached the players will proceed with the game. As of now this feature is available only for select tournaments at Absolute Poker.