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Sometimes I wonder how much poker news sites are helping to contribute to the visibility of certain online poker sites to the US government.

Granted, the DOJ knows what sites are out there, but in all truthfulness, they don’t even have to do that much research about which sites are doing well.

Hell, we tell them.

Let's all help paint a target on Merge shall we?

For example, Pokerscout releases a weekly report about online poker traffic. What is one of the stats regularly reported?

The amount of growth of certain online poker rooms. Go to the weekly report and you see that the Merge Gaming Network is up by 62% year over year and Bodog is up 55% year over year.

You can also see the average traffic for those sites, and that info is on the front page.

Every poker site has at one point or another reported on the growth of each site that still serves the US. They regularly display ads from the sites still accepting US players.

In fact, when a new site is featured, sometimes it gets its own article.

Cardplayer did its own recent article about Lock Poker now being available through the site. More and more you hear about Lock Poker everywhere you turn.

What network is that on? Merge.

So is it really surprising that it may be the next site that the DOJ is supposedly targeting? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out.

You could sit a 10 year old in front of a computer, bookmark some sites, give him a list of US-based card rooms and then tell him to let you know which site gets the most press.

So if the charges get brought against Merge and people wonder why they were targeted first, one of the answers probably should be “because we told them who to target.”