My point of view is that. yes gold times for online are over, never ever we will see 1M pot like on fulltilt, probably soon will be nl1k the highest that will be played online, but online poker won't go nowhere, from time to time some new rich kids will depo for fun to play 1k or something and low/microstakes will remain forever up to let's say nl100 (probably maybe once a month some fish will play 1-2k or whatever and then top of top regs get their share) but games will remain.. probably winrates drop more and in 5 years beating nl50 2bb/100 is top crusher I don't know maybe, maybe not.

But people who love poker started with it live, we can't forget that real poker is live. Poker has been played since late 1800s and I can bet 130 years there has been people who only live from poker, some who struggle, some who live lavish.. live poker won't go nowhere. real key to real poker success is when you can play lineup with dan bilzerian, kevin hart and whoever was there (who has seen that db pic will know what im talkin about) and ofc yea i know dan dirty dad money and not crusher etc but he has those lavish sick games around him basically whenever he wants and that's the key to real poker fortune. key is nosebleed live private games if you want to make real money.. and to play there you need a) bankroll b) willing to gamble over your roll because you wont get 50bi or 30bi for 200k bi cash games probably ever if u dont hit sick MTT c) last and the most important thing and might be even the hardest, find those games, get invited to those games or create those games and that's probably just as hard as getting cash for those games... people who have 200k br should be willing to risk 100k in those kind of games. but only real gamblers and game lovers combined with talent and crushing souls can achieve that. nits who play 100bb nl100z and won't move up because hourly is lower and regs harder won't ever get there, it need something more than just good theoretical GTO knowledge of poker.

tl dr, online poker wont vanish but will be close to unbeatable somewhere in 10 years, live is beatable and will be forever for unlimited sums.

regardless of whether or not he's done it, put in effort and you'll get somewhere. You'll need a fair bit of talent (which includes the talent of not tilting) to reach the top of online poker because not everybody's destined for greatness at poker but to dismiss it without trying like everyone saying "show us your graph" is just complete laziness or you've already failed because you didn't work hard enough or maybe you reached your ceiling because you're just not that good at poker and can't get higher.

graph or it didn't happen

If you aren't passionate about doing off table work/becoming as balanced as the human brain can achieve, then quit or play live.

If you are passionate, pursue online, but only if its to become one of the best. That said, lol @ everyone assuming poker is solved and that's that. Poker can only be solved with in game gto software that is illegal.

Human brains simply cannot come even remotely close to perfect GTO poker, not even REMOTELY close, as its INSANELY complex. Without cheating in game software + hard work and passion online poker will be beatable forever imho.

Too bad poker players who never had to work hard initially got addicted to not working hard without realizing it and don't know how to anymore. Then like to just say "oh well pokers not beatable/everyone is perfect gto bot, since money isn't landing on my face for free anymore". Poker really ended up being a big trap for most of us in that regard life wise imo.

/thread

Haha, awesome post. Couldn't agree more.

GTO in a zero rake environment is not a big problem bc as being said humans probably wont ever be truly GTO.

But when you pay 4-20bb/100 rake you dont need to be 100% GTO to reach a state where nobody can make money of each other w/o massive losers.

Those "whales" get fewer and fewer as we speak and once there arent enuff of those around anymoar/no new ones coming in it will be GG for everybody. And we arent far away from that state...

I agree that online poker is probably going to slide over the edge pretty soon. I would imagine botting is becoming pretty easy, and as traffic shrinks, sites have less and less incentive to keep these problems at bay. Honest regs will never be much of a problem unless rake increases, so yeah...

Overall I'm not too sad about it tbh. Poker has such a negative net effect on the world, and even though I ended up making more money than I would have dreamed of at the beginning, I still feel like I ended up wasting the better part of my twenties in front of my computer.

I did end up getting a degree while grinding. Only problem is I picked one that would give me a ton of free time for poker. Going back to school this fall at 27 to mend that mistake. Feeling a liiittle bit old but at this point I just want to surround me with something I find fascinating and fulfilling.

I will however play part time as long as the games are good at small stakes. The game can be a lot of fun after all, and as long as I'm not getting near a McDonalds hourly, I feel fine playing for recreation/padding of the savings account.

Will just leave this here:

http://tiltbook.com/group/2016monthlygraphs/

Highly recommend to check it at the end of each month for the fatalists ITT. Online poker isn't even close to be as dead as you guys're trying to put it here.

Of course, it's getting harder. But point being - there's still enough people who're making it as we speak for online poker to be worth taking on in 2016, imo.

Peace.

EDIT - PS: For those who say it's getting thinner at the top - check out Mixgrill's recent PGC update.

Thats teh bjuuti of this game. Variance will keep teh illusion of teh dream alive when teh dream is already ded

Untracked Asian sites are the future, but internet in China is localised so you will need a high end VPN to play and an Asian "wife" (costs about 10k) to set you up with legit bank accounts and an address. About 50k should be enough to set up any solid grinder for the gravy that will flow.

Your cognitive capabilities are at best limited.

Not a single word is made up. I can even give you the names of my sister and the ace Pharmacist I worked with so you can enter them in the google machine.

That, however, would involve further communication with you and so your inevitable comeback will probably be the last word, you cognitively compromised specimen.

gl

Adam. No one says here that poker is solved. The issue with poker is that no matter how awesome you get and how hard you work at it, you are virtually certain to make less 3-4 years from now than today.

If you are top of your field and work the hardest you can in any other job you can expect your pay to rise and not to shrink.

Stars probably will hurt your format in the upcoming years somehow and make it even less beatable than it is now.

Also the fish I met during live games and people that used to play on stars don't play anymore. The idea of playing poker got lost somewhere a couple of years ago and poker turned into software analysis. Getting better at it means basically to crunch numbers and analyse statistics. Most people don't like it really. Whenever I ask some fish why they don't play on ps anymore they always tell me that they can't win a single pot and they are rargeted and destroyed very fast. That's why they are not coming back.

Did not mean they thought it was 100% solved, just that, on average, how far along we are to perfection is much higher than the reality of the situation. Was an exaggeration

Not sure if it was the point of this thread but reading it has convinced me to cash out the few grand I had on my stars account and move it to bovada. Gg gl all

Let's put it this way. Take the best NL player alive today. Someone like OTB_Redbaron, Kanu etc.

He'll be making less in 5 years time than he's making today. They're the top workers in this industry.

Every grinder will be making less in 5 years time, since the total pie for everyone gets smaller every year. If there's $1 million in dead money available today, but $900,000 tomorrow, the grinder community is collectively taking a 10% pay cut. You have to work harder than your competition just to make the same. In other industries, working harder than your competition will result in a pay increase.

Choosing poker is like choosing to be the salmon swimming against the tide, whereas choosing a different career is like swimming in calm, flat water.

Lets all see how many ways we can say the same thing

Many different points on both sides are true about poker in this thread. The one thing poker really lacks these days is any sort of real social interaction or comradely among the player pool.

People don't realize this is a huge part as to why people get together and play live poker. At the online felt I don't even get a response half the time I commend a player on their nice hand. Only typical interaction I ever experience are the negative players trying to point out the mistakes of other players at the table or telling me they hope I die because I took their stack.

I realize this is a product of the evolution of the multitabling grinder that is almost a necessity to stay afloat as a professional in the online games but this is the problem. This failure to communicate along with the masses of multi tabling professionals are a major reason as to why the games are dying out online.

The other major problem is that the lowest stakes online that use to be a feed fish into the higher stakes no longer do so as much. The average level of skill at the lowest stakes has increased dramatically just as it has in the higher stakes but the real reason these stakes are so reg infested is that all of the staking farms out their are putting many of their staked players into these stakes. Since many of these players come from poorer countries they are much more keen on excepting 50/50 split deals to get their start and their managers many of which were top notch players themselves give them coaching and an infinite bankroll for these stakes.

Back in the day when I started you had a bunch of players from the US throwing their beer money online, usually under $500 deposits and attempting to run it up. We didn't have infinite bankrolls and top level coaching from players much better than us.

Anyway, these players are in mass numbers online now and taking alot of money out of all stakes but it's especially problematic at the lowest stakes where for the ecosystem to even have a chance at survival or at least prolong it's demise we need the entry level less than $500 depositors to occasionally hold onto their money a bit longer, maybe run it up once in awhile, and or get even a slightly better experience from this game.

I've said it many times on this forum but if the sites really want to prolong the life of the games even for a bit they need to stop the multi tabling at the lowest stakes. There isn't a problem finding a game at those stakes; players can easily find a game so these mass tabling grinders at those stakes serve no other purpose than to grind more rake for sites.

Many different points on both sides are true about poker in this thread. The one thing poker really lacks these days is any sort of real social interaction or comradely among the player pool.

People don't realize this is a huge part as to why people get together and play live poker. At the online felt I don't even get a response half the time I commend a player on their nice hand. Only typical interaction I ever experience are the negative players trying to point out the mistakes of other players at the table or telling me they hope I die because I took their stack.

I realize this is a product of the evolution of the multitabling grinder that is almost a necessity to stay afloat as a professional in the online games but this is the problem. This failure to communicate along with the masses of multi tabling professionals are a major reason as to why the games are dying out online.

The other major problem is that the lowest stakes online that use to be a feed fish into the higher stakes no longer do so as much. The average level of skill at the lowest stakes has increased dramatically just as it has in the higher stakes but the real reason these stakes are so reg infested is that all of the staking farms out their are putting many of their staked players into these stakes. Since many of these players come from poorer countries they are much more keen on excepting 50/50 split deals to get their start and their managers many of which were top notch players themselves give them coaching and an infinite bankroll for these stakes.

Back in the day when I started you had a bunch of players from the US throwing their beer money online, usually under $500 deposits and attempting to run it up. We didn't have infinite bankrolls and top level coaching from players much better than us.

Anyway, these players are in mass numbers online now and taking alot of money out of all stakes but it's especially problematic at the lowest stakes where for the ecosystem to even have a chance at survival or at least prolong it's demise we need the entry level less than $500 depositors to occasionally hold onto their money a bit longer, maybe run it up once in awhile, and or get even a slightly better experience from this game.

I've said it many times on this forum but if the sites really want to prolong the life of the games even for a bit they need to stop the multi tabling at the lowest stakes. There isn't a problem finding a game at those stakes; players can easily find a game so these mass tabling grinders at those stakes serve no other purpose than to grind more rake for sites.

Do the grinders here realise that most of the 'high' rake you pay came about not by operator price increases, but by players choosing to spread the dead money over more and more tables (and operators allowing it).

This both increases rake and decreases fish retention.

You should be campaigning for table count limits and app-only player pools, not negligible changes to the rake structure.

The sites don't care dude. They know it's screwed.

They are just milking it for all they can grab before it all goes down the toilet.

P.S. People have been campaigning for table count limits for a long time and the main operators couldn't care less.

Sites absolutely love no table amount cap.

poker is too much like riding your bike into the wind, choose another career and ride with the wind.

Poetry ITT

And thats exactly what most dont understand.
Poker in his nature has a limited Skill Edge.
And That Edge is pretty small... even like 5 years ago no one made like more than 10-12bb/100 longterm.

Yes and i think Stars is influenced by that the most.
Just Watch Bodog or 888.
First they were big Online Casinos (Slots, Table Games, Bingo, Sports betting) and then they offered Poker.
So Most of the players registered havent had the intention to Play Poker but alot of them can be seen donating Money on the tables.
So alot money from Gambling Games went into the Poker ecology

But now watch Stars.
Evryone registered on Stars to play Poker so u wont find any Sportsbetting or Slot Bingo players on the table.

sry for my bad english i often dont know if my englisch grammar makes sense