How do poker rooms count their players?

[mary]

As an investor doing due diligence, I'm looking at the Pokerpulse numbers.

Multi-tabling has me wondering: what do those numbers really represent? Are they the individual account holders being counted? Or the number of "occupied" seats?

For example, if Poker Pulse shows 40,000 players is that 40,000 people or 10,000 people four-tabling?

What percentage of players multitable and how multitabular are they? I've heard of 8 tablers. Oy!

[pokeraddict]

As an investor doing due diligence, I'm looking at the Pokerpulse numbers.

Multi-tabling has me wondering: what do those numbers really represent? Are they the individual account holders being counted? Or the number of "occupied" seats?

For example, if Poker Pulse shows 40,000 players is that 40,000 people or 10,000 people four-tabling?

What percentage of players multitable and how multitabular are they? I've heard of 8 tablers. Oy!

I am just about positive this means occupied seats, not individual accounts. I dont really have a good guess on the # of multi tablers but if I had to try I would say 20%.

[cashmirrors]

Yes, the number of players online at any one moment is the occupied seats at most sites (compare the number of tables with the total number of players).

To some extent, 40,000 seats is 40,000 players, even if they are all 4 tabling. There's minimal difference in rake produced etc (except that more tables tends to equal tighter players).

The player base is the number of account holders, but isnt' commonly available, and is bloated by inactives.

I would just use the number of seats as an indicator of volume, remembering that skins tend to report total number on the network (not sure about poker pulse but I'd guess so).