How Big Is the Average PPPoker Club? We Counted 8,188 of Them
Everyone in club poker quotes numbers. Almost nobody publishes where they came from. We pulled 8,188 PPPoker clubs and counted. Here is what the market actually looks like, with the method so you can argue with it.
Where Do These Numbers Come From?
- Sample: 8,188 unique club IDs, each counted once at its highest observed member count.
- Member counts available for 7,919 of them. The rest are excluded from size figures rather than guessed at.
- Combined membership across the sample: 971,226 player accounts.
- Clubs span 107 countries.
How Many Members Does a PPPoker Club Actually Have?
The gap between the median of 20 and the mean of 123 is the whole story. A small number of very large clubs drag the average up, and every club owner compares himself to that average and concludes he is failing. He is not. He is normal.
| Percentile | Members | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Median (50th) | 20 | Half of all clubs are below this |
| 75th | 86 | Bigger than three clubs out of four |
| 90th | 251 | Top tenth of the market |
| Average | 123 | Distorted by a handful of giants |
- 1,711 clubs have 100 or more members. That is roughly one club in five.
- Only 191 clubs have 1,000 or more members, which is 2.4% of the sample.
- The largest single club in the sample has 8,918 members.
How Many PPPoker Clubs Are Actually Dead?
This is the number that reframes the market. When a club owner asks why his tables will not fill, the honest answer is that most clubs never fill. Nearly four in ten are below the threshold where a game can start at all, and no amount of advertising fixes a lobby with six people in it.
Who Actually Holds the Players?
- Top 100 clubs: 28.3% of all members.
- Top 500 clubs: 61.0% of all members.
- 82% of all players sit inside unions that hold more than one club.
Liquidity concentrates, and it concentrates into shared pools. That is the structural reason independent clubs stall, and it is visible in the counts rather than in anyone's opinion.
How Many Poker Unions Actually Exist?
This matters directly when you are choosing one. Most of what calls itself a union is a single club with a union name on it, which gives you no extra liquidity at all. Before joining anything, ask how many clubs are in the pool and how many players are online at your stakes on a Tuesday night.
- 2,301 union names, of which only 521 hold two clubs or more.
- The largest union in the sample holds 165 clubs.
- 6,209 clubs belong to some union; 1,979 (24%) run standalone.
Where Are PPPoker Clubs Located?
| Country | Clubs | Members | Avg club |
|---|---|---|---|
| Russia | 1,655 | 195,047 | 117 |
| Brazil | 1,042 | 200,118 | 192 |
| America | 353 | 32,615 | 92 |
| Japan | 293 | 21,766 | 74 |
| Philippines | 195 | 42,985 | 220 |
| Mexico | 168 | 24,461 | 145 |
| India | 166 | 15,439 | 93 |
| Thailand | 154 | 38,520 | 250 |
Average club size varies more than the club counts do. Thailand and the Philippines run far larger clubs on far fewer of them, while Japan has many clubs that are mostly small.
What Does This Mean If You Run a Club?
- Your club is probably normal. If you have under a hundred members you are in the same place as four clubs out of five. The adverts you are comparing yourself to describe the top 2%.
- Size is not the problem, pooling is. 82% of players are in multi-club pools. A club of 20 members on its own cannot start a game; the same 20 members inside a pool can.
- Check the union before you join it. 77% of union names in the sample are a single club wearing a union label. Ask for the club count and the online numbers at your stakes.