I still browse these forums casually (lost my username in that bizarre crash last year), and there's always a mixed sentiment on the issue of game states. First of all, people seem to think that play, particularly reg play, improved vastly over the last few years. While I think the lack of beatability of the games has been somewhat overblown, I'd agree that midstakes play did improve significantly.

Once in awhile, I run across discussions of how good the games will be if/when iPoker returns to the US. I think I can answer with confidence that they'll be exceptional. Over the weekend I played a lot of hands on Seals With Clubs and the games at basically 75-100NL were laughably soft. To put that into context, this is still a poker room which is attracting, for the most part, people who want to play poker or people who follow/study poker to varying degrees of intensity, and probably a few SilkRoad drug users who just want to fool around a little. In addition, I've put in probably two dozen or so live sessions since Black Friday and the live play is still so absurdly hilariously bad at even significant stakes, that I found myself on multiple occasions shocked/sad that Full Tilt 100NL semmed absolutely tougher than 5/10 at commerce.

The point, however, is I don't think we appreciate just how difficult 2006 made the game for everyone. Post UIGEA, we were bascially playing poker with people who had to jump through at least one hoop to get money on a site, as most bank cards were being rejected. So at the very least, putting money on a site entailed knowing someone with money on a site playing poker regularly. We were essentially always playing with people who played poker as a hobby.

Think about how many recreational home game players who just booked a big win in their garage couldn't instantly jump on to take a shot at 5/10 NL. Think about all the guys who couldn't make their football sundays more enjoyable by throwing in 216 bucks for a 750k guaranteed. How about just the fact that we never had those random 50-400 dollar deposits going all day every day. I guess what I'm trying to say is that for a few years, the games showcased some of the best skill in poker, and they were still really, really good.

While I obviously haven't jumped onto Stars/Tilt lately, my guess is that the current ROW pools probably are pretty tough. My intuition is that non US gamblers prefer table games for the vast majority of their action, and that non US players are probably in the upper echelon of skill at every stake for reasons manifold. Still, of all the players in the last few years, almost no one was disappointed to see someone from a non Northern Europe/Scandinavian country at their table.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that if online poker comes back, and it's very sad because I always thought hte question was going to be "when" and not "if," we can look forward to some pretty damned good games in the future. And should Poker be advertised and pushed on TV again, it wouldn't surprise me if the games returned to Party 2004-2006 levels up to about 200NL forever, and that same skill level up to about 5/10-10/20 for a significant amount of time until that player pool goes broke and finds a home at the lower rung.

tl;dr games will be very good if/when iPoker comes back

profound insight

cliffs

-live poker is easy/will be forever

-UIGEA is bad, clearly

-online games arnt as good without 'merica


sometimes i read new things on the internet and feel like i learned something, this is not one of those times.

2+2 is your blog

All I'm saying is that occasionally people will express significant concern about the future beatability of online poker. I'm simply saying that those who have anxiety over everyone becoming solid and no money to be made clearly don't need to have one iota of worry. Barring NL poker vastly improving and the game being solved and bots taking over, I don't think we have anything to even think about.

Have you considered that the fish will also lose their money much quicker than they used to?

they will be making more money from their real jobs because of technological advancement and capitalism

1. Fish to reg ratio was much better in the party days. Online players weren't nearly as good as they were now.

2. regs weren't playing 20+ tables like they are now

3. Huds have evolved far beyond what they were.

4. Training sites aren't new anymore. There's a ton of them around teaching players how to play better fundamentals.

5. Live games have always been, and will always be much softer than online games.

/end thread

While I appreciate your concerns, you're still seeing the glass extremely half empty. I figure you to be in the "OMG HUDZ GONNA KILL POKER OMG" crowd. The thing is, the only people worrying about HUDS, and training sites, and playing 20+ tables are grinders, who in a new poker economy will make up an absurdly small proportion of the player pool.

Think of it this way, the people who play regular live poker are still awful, and I don't see them sitting down for three hours a week to watch Deuces Cracked. At the very most they might pick up Phil Godon's Little Green Book or whatever at Barnes and Noble.

This ubiquitous fear of permanently difficult games is just not grounded in reality. HUDs and Training sites simply don't make the tremendous difference that you think they do.

Nice job. Good deal fer all you done. Can we get more for this?

If the quality of poker play has improved so much, you should expect to at least see some of it on live poker.

Live poker is softer because people cannot multitable there and because it's relatively easy for casual players to deposit. Sites can do some moves to curtail multitabling somewhat, but the key for worldwide liquidity - not only American, is having the large, affluent US market being able to deposit easily on sites.

That's where the flaw in OP's thinking lies. Yes, if US comes back, games are going to be easier. But we still have a long way before that happens.

LOL. SA wrote almost this same OP a lot better and funnier a while ago but I'm too lazy to find it.

how about we worry about poker coming back before we speculate how the games are gonna be?

Fish to reg ratio as you guys are pointing out does not exist.


Poker will always have fish and shark, it does not matter how good or bad the players that are sitting are.

You all fail to understand why the games are unbeatable with you cry for bad players.


If iPoker comes out in the US it won't be much differen unless we as players demand the right thing:

-beatable and sustainable games


There is only one thing that can make a game unsustainable and that is the rake.

I have never heard any players ask for that. Its like poker players don't even understand how their game works an why online poker as we have it now wont ever work.

Too many hypotheticals and assumptions in the OP to take seriously. You have no idea what online poker would look like if/when it comes back (rake, taxes, rules, # of tables limit, player pools, etc etc)

This is so true. It's been beat to death but I do think it's important to keep repeating it so it will sink in for the newer players coming on the scene. Excessive rake absolutely destroys the long term viability of many or most new sign ups who are ultimately going to be if not the industry's entire lifeblood, at least a notable portion of its volume. Its the same points being made over and over but they are undeniable and their opponents invariably resort to some kind of obfuscation to side step their poignancy and obvious truth. You can't have rake that exceeds a competent player's win rate by 10 times or even 5 times. As the field toughens and edges diminish the rake must be lowered commensurately or the games will die. Otherwise you have nothing more than the rankest kind of corporate raiders bleeding a business to an untimely death masquerading as benevolent entertainment providers, sites who as has now been pointed out 1000 times have interest in degrading poker to the abject state of roulette. And it may need to be pointed out 1000 times more before its absorption reaches the necessary levels.

How good will the state of games be? The system is complex enough I wouldn't trust a RAND corporation report on it. But there is no doubt it will in large part depend on the extent to which our burgeoning industry's captains understand the factors which will lead to long term growth and stability and hopefully adopt them in lieu of some kind of ugly but difficult to discredit bumper sticker philosophy like "greed is good" or "we're all dead in the long run".

while the thread is lacking substance, i applaud to the optimism

The chances of you being able to bum hunt your way to some easy profit online if / when poker returns to the US is the same as someone not posting "tl,dr" after that op...

1. Live poker donks, though still awful, are on average still better than what they were prior to the 03 moneymaker boom. Even the average player is more educated through pro commentary ever since televised poker took off. This effect keeps growing as more shows get put on the air, more sites gain popularity, and sites strike deals with cardrunners or pt4/hem to promote their products.

2. Your assumptions of live poker games being still being soft doesn't carry over to online well.....even if games start to become legal in the US. A majority of your newbie fish players are always going to try their first non home game experience in a live setting as oppose to the online setting. Fish don't go busto as fast in live play because regs cant clone themselves and play more than 1 table. While multitablers like myself only make up a small % of all online players, we are on basically every table out there at stakes 1/2 and up. I'm not saying games won't be softer than they currently are today. They will definitely be softer. But to assume NL200+ (6max) games will have 3-5 fish at every table is dreaming. That was what the partypoker days were like. That is what we'll never seen again. Microstakes will be helped greatly by new legislation and that will certainly help the overall poker economy but it sounds like you're expecting a Moneymaker 2 effect....2nd Boom? Nope. In order for that big of a boom to happen again...China would have to allow Ipoker.

FWIW. I've been playing since 03.

exorbitant rake though.

i feel that ppl are going to be appalled at the rake these U.S. facing ipoker sites charge. these sites aren't going to be worried about the so called "pros" ... they are going to rake the games to death and not even care (b/c the donkeys aren't sophisticated enough to know the difference).

OP's views seem pretty solid, with no barriers to deposit there will be plenty of degens who think they can beat poker.

As we know, even continuous losers redeposit as they can put their losses down to 'bad luck' as oppose to re-evaluating their game.

Yeah, but there is a quicker "long term" in online poker, for obvious reasons...

These are actually good points though they've bee posted before, it's nice to see a positive outlook in NVG sometimes.

So to clarify, I don't think the next poker boom is going to be as large as the Moneymaker boom, nor will the games be as soft....but I think they'll be close. One thing that I think everyone is under estimating is the effect that "legitimate" casinos will have on iPoker if it is passed. Even in the Party Poker days, there were SO many people who thought all of these online poker rooms were just super shady operations (and looking back, turns out they were right). These poker rooms also spent hardly any marketing budgets at all. Those sporadic ads for PartyPoker/Pokerstars/FullTilt were terrible. With strong brand recognition and the marketing muscle behind it, I could see the next poker boom being surprisingly large.

As far as difficulty, I only really started playing poker towards the end of the PP days. I expect that low-mid stakes in the future will be similarly difficult to that time period in 2005-2006. I am, of course, speaking about levels from 50-200/400NL or so. At the time towards the very end of Party, I remember players were not at all terrible in "OMG this is AMAZING," sense of terrible, but terrible in the Tuff_Fish, "wow, this guy is cluelesss post-flop and stacking off with top pair in bad spots and really deep" sense. Basically, I think we'll se a return to the time when you can be a reasonably significant winner without having to deviate from a very tight, straightforward "fish frying" strategy up to probably 5/10 or so.

I also think that the poker situation has gotten so bleak that when people look to the past, they see it through a kind of rose colored lenses. I used to post on the Deuces Cracked forums, and there was a thread where we were all talking about the old Party days, and I think it was Ansky or someone else who was pretty good that basically brought up the fact that there were actually some pretty tough games and some pretty tough players at Party 10/20+, but the big difference was that there we so many of those games running at all times that you could find pretty good ones regularly. I took a couple of lessons from Andrew "MuddyWaters" Wiggins when I first started playing and Party got shut down, and I'll never forget how he thought that the games were starting to get absurdly tough. Looking back, this is of course ridiculous, but everything is relative I suppose.

We'll also see the return of the posisbility to make it to nosebleeds. In the last few years, it's been so tough, because in order to get to the highest level, the second highest level has to exist, and we've all but seen the eradication of 25/50 games. In the old days, you could take an underrolled shot at 100/200+, dump a few buyins and say "oh well, I guess I'll just grind 25/50 for a couple of months and try it again. Nowadays, that just simply isn't the case, and dropping those buyins has significant bankroll reprecussions.

As far as the rake issue, again, I think as iPoker starts to become leglized, we'll need to lobby for a reasonable rake situation. I actually expect it to be very similar to PokerStars in both rake and rewards. These companies are not going to be reinventing the wheel, and I think there's a huge misconception out there about who is really being sought after int he poker market based on the "will you move to NV thread." The multi-tabling regulars are absolutely a PokerRoom's best friend, and a healthy poker ecosystem is just as important to them as it is for us. Think about it, if it wasn't, you wouldn't have live casinos where it is easy for people to walk in and play hire shills and game starters.

So for tl;dr, while I think there's a lot of work ahead of us, and the operative word is "if," as in "if online poker is legalized, there is still a lot to be optimistic about.