Quote:
Originally Posted by pineapple888
OP, you may want to analyze more than one factor, if you want your paper to be anything approaching worthwhile.
In particular, the UIGEA decimated the pool of casual players, and online poker never really recovered.
There still would have been some sort of equilibrium eventually, but it would have been 10x (or whatever) better than what happened, because there are WAY more casual and/or stupid and/or lazy players than there are smart, motivated, skilled players.
Plus you throw in the financial crisis/recession, and now you have two enormous shocks to any theoretical equilibrium model you might have had.
This is very true, but more of a USA problem. If you look at poker globally, OP, which you should, Try to network with some players with access to Pokerstars in other countries, Russia and Spain have a LOT of casual players. If you can watch some sessions from a micro/small stakes player and then also find a winning Mid stakes player to watch sessions with, write down player names.
Go to Pokertableratings.com and look up these players results, on small networks like Cake, there are many many players dumping thousands in penny games, for Pokerstars I imagine that number proportionately is the same to the player pool, but we are talking about a lot of money.
What I would look for, while watching a session, would be number of winning/losing players per table, how much they won/lost, and what the Net would be, it should be a negative number as the rake has to get money from somewhere. Look at how long the losing players have been playing, how many hands, come up with a way to show how much casual money is coming in, based on number of full tables per site, or perhaps based on number of logged in players, and base this on number of hands played.
You should be able to figure out how much money comes into a site per hand if you take even a small sample of tables, how much goes to rake each hand, and how much money is up for grabs. And you could do this based on time zone, focusing on peak times for that particular country.