PokerTableRatings.com Adds Servers Due to Isildur1 Traffic

The high-stakes action on Full Tilt Poker has been fierce. With the arrival of Isildur1, an unknown Swedish pro, online poker players have flocked to sites like PokerTableRatings.com to recap hands that have occurred on Full Tilt and check out the latest earnings from other high-stakes regulars. If you’ve visited PokerTableRatings.com then in recent weeks, then you’ve likely noticed a sizable increase in its speed thanks to the introduction of a second server.

PokerTableRatings.com’s Tim Sullivan told PokerSoftware.com that, despite Isildur1’s recent hiatus from the virtual felts, his site has seen a tremendous amount of traffic: “Traffic has been so high because of the Isildur1 phenomena, but since he has stopped playing, almost all of that traffic has stuck. It seems like once people find PTR, they continue to come back.” PokerTableRatings.com houses a wealth of cash game results from the major online poker sites and is an excellent way to track your friends, family, and opponents.

So what are these servers that are now powering PokerTableRatings.com? What has made the site faster than a cheetah as the online poker world enters 2010? Sullivan explained, “We are now load balancing our traffic across multiple servers so we can serve pages much faster and continue to expand as demand warrants. The servers are dual quad core xeons at 2.66 GHz with 32 GB of memory apiece.” Registration to PokerTableRatings.com is completely free and, after surfing a few pages on the website, users are asked to log in.

In the last two months, traffic on PokerTableRatings.com has doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 visits per day. By the time the clock strikes midnight on the 2009 calendar year, PokerTableRatings.com officials note that the site should reach a colossal 170 million pageviews in the last 365 days. Isildur1 stormed onto the online poker scene in November, although he has largely vacated the industry thanks to a data mining incident involving CardRunners instructor Brian Townsend, who had his Full Tilt Poker Red Pro status suspended for one month.

Sullivan commented that the staff of PokerTableRatings.com has, like the rest of the industry, been absorbed in the latest shenanigans of Isildur1. On the impact of the Swedish player, Sullivan told PokerSoftware.com, “I can tell you that I have skipped meetings to rail those games. I didn't think we would see a million dollar pot any time soon and now we have two. Right now, there are over 2,000 comments on Isildur1's PokerTableRatings page. He's obviously the biggest story this year and it’s been fun to watch.”

The rest of the online poker community seems to agree. On PokerNewsDaily.com, a poll offering several nominations for the top story of 2009 revealed that 261 out of 448 respondents believe that Isildur1 headlined the news world this year, or 58%. Second place in the same poll, believe it or not, went to Team PokerStars Pro member Joe Cada becoming the youngest World Series of Poker Main Event champion ever at age 21. Cada earned $8.5 million for his efforts and appeared on a variety of mainstream television programs like the “Late Show with David Letterman” and “ESPN SportsCenter.”

PokerTableRatings.com is a Recommended Software program on PokerSoftware.com and supports Absolute Poker, Bodog, Full Tilt, PartyPoker, and bwin.