On Thursday, a thread appeared in the PocketFives forums about PartyPoker removing several high-stakes cash game tables. The thread was entitled “PartyPoker removes cash tables higher than $5/$10 – sigh” and over on Two Plus Two, it was alleged that the move was made in order to “make improvements to our poker ecology and [is] in our players’ best interests.”

Pokerfuse published a statement from PartyPokerit received that claimed, “We have removed some of our super high-stakes games. This decision has been taken to make improvements to our poker ecology and [is] in our players’ best interests. We believe this change will improve the action at our tables and is in the best interest of the poker room as a whole.”

The highest cash game table available on PartyPoker at the time of writing is $5/$10 No Limit Hold’em, of which there were eight in operation. PartyPoker also had three $5/$10 Pot Limit Omaha and three $5/$10 Pot Limit Omaha Eight or Better tables going. However, games above $5/$10 No Limit, $5/$10 Pot Limit, and $30/$60 Limit are now distant memories.

One Brazilian poster on PocketFives was less-than-enthusiastic about the decision to axe several high-stakes tables, posting, “They have the best chance now to improve and take a good % of the poker market out there since only PokerStars is there now and Full Tilt Poker has been offline for a long time.” The same poster felt that capping the action at $5/$10 was a major step in the wrong direction.

On why PartyPoker would act suddenly, one poster on Two Plus Two speculated, “I’m guessing this decision was made to try and stem the flow of fish money that is burned at speed at HSNL, resulting in less rake for Party that would otherwise have been gained from the fish losing money more slowly at lower stakes and thus being able to play more hands before going bust.”

Another poster on Two Plus Two pointed out that we might not have seen the last of the high-stakes tables at PartyPoker: “PKR recently did something pretty similar. They removed $10/$20+ and then at request they came back. However, when they came back, it was ‘restricted,’ meaning only players who were approved by PKR security were allowed to sit at tables, thus ending bum-hunting forever at these stakes.”

One poker player presented empirical data on the ratio of money won to money raked at various stakes. He told the community, “At a $50 buy-in game, the ratio [of money won to money raked] was roughly 1:1. At a $1K buy-in, the ratio was 5:1. Party is hurting financially and the simple calculation must be: if our ecology is x, we get x in rake if we only have low-stakes games. If we allow high-stakes games, we only get x/5.”

According to PokerScout, PartyPoker has plenty of traffic overall. The site is the third busiest worldwide in terms of cash game volume and owns a seven-day running average of 2,600 real money ring game players (pictured). PartyPoker’s network, which includes sites like WPT Poker, trails only PokerStars and the iPoker Network in terms of cash game liquidity.

In PokerScout’s weekly traffic report on Monday, it was revealed that PartyPoker’s cash game traffic is off 50% year-over-year despite the loss of Full Tilt Poker, which went offline in June 2011 and was once the second busiest site worldwide. After topping 6,000 cash game players seven times between May 21 and June 5 of this year, PartyPoker has failed to do so any day since.

PokerScout officials told PocketFives that the last time PartyPoker was in second place worldwide in terms of real money ring game volume was seven weeks ago on June 3.