being european I often find myself thinking about this too.
I was a massive bonus whore and played on 25+ sites including all the big ones
and back then I saw no big difference between stars and party for example.
(ran good at stars and bat at FT)

as I evolved from bonuswhoring to rakebackgrinding I catched up the popular saying that the big 2 are infested with sick good americans
and that I'm priviledged because I can play all those super fishy euro sites.

like 2 months ago I'm starting to think over once again...
I play FR and when I see the hands posted in the strategyforums they often include so bad fishes like I've never seen on ongame or ipoker
(ok, I know like 3 real megafishes at NL100 FR but thats it..)
from distance it seems to me that the game at stars/FT is way looser in general than at Ipoker and at Ipoker I always try to play at the loosest tables I can find..

also I got a friend playing sitngos who recently switched from ipoker to stars and he says the field is more loose passive there...

Before the legilation stars was super tight compared to like every other site I played back then, I dont know how u thought it was like party.

The way I look at it the sites with the most players will have the highest concentration of fish on average right? Seems like Stars, Tilt & Party would be the obvious choices.

Its pretty obvious the more players a site has, the more fish a site has.
But the same goes for sharks.

We are talking percentages here, not quantity.

Lets imagine you play heads up.
On one small site there is 100 players and 10 fish.
On another bigger site there is 1000 players and 100 fish.
The odds of you playing a fish are the same on both sites even though there are more fish on the bigger site. I hope you know what I am getting at.

But how can you even vote? Unless you played on all sites you cant really qualify to vote :S

Highest number, yes. Highest concentration, no.

P.S. According to pokerscout, iPoker is #3 now, ahead of Party.

I just thought I should clarify my earlier post. The reason why non-US poker sites would be softer isn't because Americans are necessarily better players. It's because the UIGEA has weeded out many of the fish by making it seemingly more difficult to deposit, by scaring the less-knowledgeable fish into thinking they will go to jail if they play online poker, etc. Therefore, there is a much higher sharks-fish ratio amongst American online players.

There may be many of you that have a high level of success on sites that allow Americans. Maybe you play well against those types of players for some reason. Maybe you're running well. I don't know what it is, but I really find it hard to buy an argument that, for example, Stars is fishier than every non-US site. I just logged on to Poker Stars and checked out 3/6 SH FL...best PF% I could find was 45%. 5/10, there's one at 55%, a few in the high 40's, but most are mid 30's to mid 40's. Where I play, I'm disappointed to play on anything less than about 55-60%. If the best I could find was 45%, I'll be checking other limits, checking other sites. To me, the numbers don't lie. Maybe it's different for other games/limits, but from what I've heard, I don't think so.

Ive played on all of the above apart from Ipoker & ongame. I would say Cake & party but I think absolute poker had the most fish, especially after the scandal!

This is so true, I had a spell on absolute recently and the play was sooooo sooooo sooo bad.

But dont say that in here, it upsets some people.

Pacific is like Party was in 2006

Still one table only?

No , up to 4 now, but the UI is still so bad it's difficult to play that many, at least for me.

god this thread sucks

>>The reason why non-US poker sites would be softer isn't because Americans are necessarily better players

Americans are far better than European players. The only exception I think is Germans.

Since about 2 weeks I have been searching intensive a site to play NL400. I am European and I was always looking in forums / review pages for fishy sites to play at.

My experience was always that a poker site which has no sportsbetting / casino never can be that fishy like the ones that have betting/casino. The main argument here is, that bettors/gamblers are richer fish that take shots at poker time after time because they are GAMBLING ADDICTED, not like Jimmy Jackson who decides to put 400 bucks on stars, then loses them at NL400 and quit poker until the next salary.

Other important factors are tracker compatibility and multitabling options. When a fish enters stars, he won´t do any table selection. His chance to sit down at a table with mainly 8 tabling 15/13/2 grinders (I talk about NL200-400) is very high. Soon this will frustrate him and he could think about giving another site a chance.

So until January 08 Pacific was definetly the fishiest midstakes site for me, but these days I see more and more rugular grinders there, so I still did not decide which site putting my money on.