Looks like a student presentation, I don't see an ounce of PHD intellect on that powerpoint

If bots became anything but an under-the-radar blip on the screen, the entire game would collapse. No one will buy-in if their opponent is a nearly (or totally) unbeatable bot. Well, the only people who will still buy-in will be people who are looking to lose anyways.

Most players think (rightly or wrongly) they can win. If you shatter that assumption, the game ceases. It becomes a play chip game, except you have to pay for the pleasure of sitting at the table.

It was easier to start a small business, or become a professional athlete, or get a book published 100 years ago than it is today.

My humble opinion is that this very much looks like poker in 2013:



And this is the bulk of the regpool:



Mining has been good for years but an alarming new breed of miner has sprung into existence, much to everyones dismay!



Woah! Miners with pimping-ass bicycles!

Now, the original miners are obviously alarmed by the fact that the pimping new breed can run circles around them and pick off all the gold more easily. They are also quite annoyed by the fact that they have a vague idea of how to build bicycles of their own but they're not quite sure how, and trial and error seems uncomfortable.

So on they go, plucking off the scraps from the biker douchebags, all the time reminiscing about the good old days when the days quota could be reached before lunchtime.

Moral of the story: If there's gold lying around, crafty people will find a way to get it effectively. Also, don't be lazy - build a ******* bike if you wan't to keep up with the big boys.

i am mildly optimistic on this, although it may take some time until the poker community gets their heads out of their arses. they started doing so in regards to HUDs lately, the non denial of bots will follow sometimes soon.

these thingies have a natural tendency to become too good and thus to stick out. also, if we reinterpret our play as play in relation to the strongest bots play, we may finally be able do determine the handicap of each player.

EDIT 2: Link to the class site (my bad for not posting it earlier): http://web.mit.edu/willma/www/mit15s50.html

Based only off your description of your professors thoughts (I didn't look into the lectures) I would argue he is wrong about the future of the poker economy. Markets will always become more efficient over time. Take a look at the stock market over the past 30 years for a good example of this. People will still make money if they evolve ahead of the market. Poker will continue to become more efficiently played and edges will still be had but people who think that there will be some new "boom" like 2006 are just using wishful thinking and often site reasons that are not realistic.

I'd like to see a video where the points were elaborated upon. Also, not sure why he said live playing needs 10x the online bankroll? Fewer hands, more variance? Did he just assume online was 10x more or is this pretty basic?

I like the gold mining analogy, although it is only an analogy.

So today what role do shovels and pick axes play in that business? How many successful placer miners have recently been featured in the business press? Do modern miners defer to the "spirit of the game" or yield to the temptation of first steam shovels then bucket excavators, developments fueled by the ruling capital interests when they felt the ground shift beneath their feet? How did the competition react? And where are the long lost throngs, tin pan entrepreneurs sifting though pristine spring snow melts? A lottery ticket seems so much easier.

Things to come...

Last time I checked, intellect used the metric system

Joseph Stalin's long career began with robbing banks.

Markets do seem to trend towards efficiency but whether that's a desirable outcome is debatable. The mining analogy runs pretty deep. The field, whether extraction of coal, silver or the "yellow metal that makes white men crazy" was once dominated by individual labor. It has since been supplanted by extraction methods whose efficiency makes spoofery of their origins. Mining is perhaps the archetypal commodity business, with no producer's product being meaningfully distinguishable from any other - all product being standardized and fungible, the most efficient conceivable state. This has given rise to barriers to entry that are truly formidable, yet at the same time pure, no special relationship with a banker or congressman will help you buy a Bagger 288, one of the largest most expensive machines ever produced, if your mineral claim isn't productive. And if it is productive you will be forced to submit to the highly efficient market, leave your shovel in the garden shed. That's assuming you own a major mineral claim, which you don't.

So when the ones who do won't hire you or any of your friends to drive the great mechanical buckets and run the patented chemical processes, and you're left standing there with you're rusty, antiquated pick axe with nothing to eat then you may out of desperation ask yourself "what would Joseph Stalin do"?

IMO the near and medium term future for poker is not sunny.

NLHE is a game that has far less edge than it did and too many recreational players feel its lost its shine. As I am fond of saying "grandma will check ship a pair and a flush draw"

I'm a fish and I play with other fish all the time in live games in FLA. the only real winner is the house. I have basically quit poker to play daily fantasy sports because the fun has been sucked out of poker.

I don't have the answer to this. Things are cyclical and likely poker will rebound, but for fish ie new money to come in the game needs to be fun and exciting.

***

I agree.

As long as humans live in a world where "survival of the fittest" doesn't really have anything to do with being fittest, evolution is no longer occuring.

Historically, the smartest and strongest and most well adapted had the most kids. The poorly adapted generally died and didn't procreate. Humans have created a world for themselves where this no longer applies. The poorly adapted now receive aid in different forms, and while their lives may not be great, they generally reproduce just as much (or more) than the better adapted.

Our things (computers, cars, bombs) are evolving, our knowledge is evolving, but we as a biological species are not any longer, aside from cases in certain areas of the world where "survival of the fittest" is actually still occuring.

Stop playing NLHE. At least online, there are many other options.

The world of poker needs to move on to Omaha soon. And then eventually something else. And then something else.

I'm on a 6max table right now with 5 fish. Problem is volume. I am on a local govt site that averages many weak tables, the problem is you can't find the volume. I am in Canada so I'm sure in the US if it gets regulated or even if they involve all of canada you involve the entire country you can get the volume.

What I'm afraid of in the US is how fast the weak players will get weeded out with all the pro's waiting for the action.

Yes and No. Yes and No.

It will get much harder then it is today, you have seen nothing yet! Believing that the "fish" will continue to sink millions and billions of dollars at the tables is make believe fantasy thinking. It won't happen and I would guess that deposits has taken a deep dive the last few years, at least data produced seem to suggest this. If you think of poker as a game of skill where you have 100 skill points where 100 is the absolute best player and if two players are playing they split every pot by their skill points. Think of a 10 and a 20 playing a $30 pot, the 10 get $10 and the 20 get $20. Give yourself some points and then imagine that you are playing against a 0, a 1, a 2 etc until you reach a level where you have no profit due to rake. You will see that there is room for the games to get much tougher before you stop playing for lack of returns. You may have rake back but you still need to make a profit in total. When it comes to bots they only need to get good enough to destroy the game, in fact they don't even need to win at the tables since there is rake back.

The future for online poker isn't good since you have enough decent/good player in the pool as it is. You even have people making a living from the micro stakes which translate into money being taken out of the economy never to be put in again. The low/medium stakes aren't seeing people moving money up to them anymore, at least not at the same rate as earlier and this is what will eventually make the game collapse. You have a few net-depositors at these levels left but I predict they will go soon and people will need to move down or out.

You may not see the clouds in the horizon right now but know that the worse storm ever is coming. BF won't mean **** compared to what you are facing the coming years and most of you will hurt from this since you won't take actions now to prepare for it. You will wait until SHTF and be forced to act giving you much less room to make the correct decisions in what to do. Some will move to a cheap country to continue to play but this will only work short term, in the long run the online games are dead as they are structured today. There will still be money in the games but not enough to go around for everyone who is in it making a profit today.

In a perfect (or non-perfect) world where everyone plays optimally the game is dead. However there will always be fish and plenty of them because the majority of fish don't care about improving. Most don't even know they're fish.

Sure some get sick of losing and disappear but the fact is the majority of fish just love the game, don't know they're playing terribly and probably don't even know they're losing.

It's only a relatively small minority of players who actually take the game seriously. That's why 80% of players are losers.

Yes the standard of play improves over time but it's not to the extent that many suggest. There just aren't enough dedicated players. The views of people posting on 2+2 distorts the truth. 90% of players in the poker world don't even know 2+2 exists.

Edit: just noticed title is online poker. I thought it was just poker.

The above relates more to live poker. Yeah online is obviously tougher for all the obvious reasons.

for being lazy i will just cherry pick your post.

rake back was a big mistake. so much is true. but there is an evolution in botting as well. the rake-back-bots that used to be around are no longer competitive. what we see is bots that are way better than all other players at the stakes they play. it is more or less sit back and wait for a bot that crushes the nosebleeds so we can all agree on ..time is now to adjust to the new situation.

i am always for cutting things short. so let's assume this bot already exists and work from there. everything else is just wasting time and will make things more painful.

these lecture slides look like a joke lol

What you don't get is that if there is one winner who can make a living in online poker for every 100 people who register you are talking about 10 winning players for every 1000 that register and deposit. Or roughly 200 seats of winners at the tables. The bad players seldom play more then 4 tables so what you are talking about is that every month 200 seats of winners are taken and about 400 losing seats are taken. Problem now is that the losers will stop depositing after awhile where the winners will stay. If we imagine that a loser deposits 1,2k before they are done and deposit $200 at a time they will be there for 6 months, the winners aren't going away. After a 12 month period you have:

12x200 = 2400 winning seats
6x400 = 2400 losing seats

If you don't get this math you are delusional. While my figures are made up and has a basis in nothing the argument should get trough, there is a breaking point where new winners will take up more seats then what the losers add every month.
It is pretty obvious that these bots are out there, probably in the HU games and are raking in massive amounts of money. People are just to delusional to believe a bot could beat them so they go bum hunting instead. Bots where "impossible to make profitable in NL" a few years back and are now pretty much accepted as being part of the system. Only problem with the bots is that they will get better as time progresses and rake in huge sums for their owners, a bot at 0,01BB's/100 will make a small fortune over a year mega-tabling at relatively small stakes. In the penny games we are talking about some serious money considering any bot owner will have 20 of these running for a few million hands/year each.

I will never forget one thing I read few years ago. It was about oil (gas and it's derivatives).

First prediction about shortage of oil and its exploitation came to live just 4 years after it has been discovered. After that first one, there were, and still are many predictions, articles, scientific researches all saying it will come soon.
And now, more than 150 years after, annual production is still increasing.

Next boom will happen. Will it be different game - PLO or OFC even, or because of new Moneymaker or 'cause law restrictions will be terminated, or an asteroid will fall with alien in it who will give 1 000 000 $ to everyone who registers on Stars/Full Tilt/888?
I have no idea, but as usual time will tell.

History does not say the poker boom and bust was part of a cycle.
At one time drive-in theaters were popping up all over the place, popularity declined and will very likely never come back.

Grunch

What stakes are we talking about? I used to play 100NL-200NL on FTP before BF, but since then I have only played 10NL - 20NL on Revolution. I can tell you that at 10NL & 20NL my win rate is better now than when I played micros before BF. I guess it could be for many reasons. Maybe I got better, I'm running good or whatever. But, the games at the lower levels don't seem to be harder. I couldn't answer this question for 100NL+, but it seems logical that those games got much harder.

One thing I will say is that poker has been around for hundreds of years and there will always be new players in the game. Also, there will always be true gamblers that like to play poker, but for whatever reason don't play well. Just like the financial markets, there are psychological factors that play into poker skill. No matter how much poker information is out there on the web to make the learning curve steeper, there will always be new players,psychologically challenged players that tilt, and true gamblers that don't care about playing properly.

That being said, I think the difficulty of the online game is 100% a function of the perceived illegality of poker in the U.S. and that most people don't trust any sites enough to deposit or keep any significant money online. I don't think the average skill level of the random tourist/casual player has changed much.

Sorry accidentally posted with my phone