These youngins don't care about the poker economy

Oh yeah I get you. I bring $600 bucks when I go play (enough for 3 max buy ins at 1/2 at my local room). If I get it in for flips three times and lose every one, so be it. That happens sometimes, and yeah it sucks when it does. But that's life.

You're not wrong about the post flop play, and definitely the river. Last time I played, most of the table did not have big stacks, the majority were 200 or under. I was regularly betting 15 to open and still getting 2 callers most of the time (we had a straddle-y vibe going too). It was common to open 15 in EP with JJ, get 2-3 callers, make a pot size flop bet and get one caller. Suddenly on the turn the pot is like 150 and everyone only has one PSB behind. River play becomes non-existent and stacks get in on the turn or they fold.

General rule I have for 1/2: Assume that no one is every bluffing if they raise river. You won't always be right, but you will be rarely wrong.

"General rule I have for 1/2: Assume that no one is every bluffing if they raise river. You won't always be right, but you will be rarely wrong."

In the 1/2 games I play in this is an excellent rule to follow!

Yeah. 20-something-year-olds have less disposable income, so we'll mainly see them Friday or Saturday evenings. If, during weekdays, casinos ran a .50c-$1 game like the old Bill's Gambling Hall in Vegas used to, which is like the limit that they probably play in their homes games, I think we'd see more of them weekday evenings. Obviously understandable that casinos wouldn't run this game on weekends.

Yep, just started to notice. Played 2-5 at Parx on Saturday morning. ...average age at table was around 55. Then again, all the young guys were probably sleeping.

Try to picture 2004 and realize just how few other things there were vying for the attention of the average 18-30 year old at that time. Heck - the first iphone didn't even get released until 2007!

While to some degree young players will be inspired by vloggers and perhaps the perception that the older playing pool means money to be had, young people tend to go where young people go and that isn't poker rooms these days.

That being said, if it truly becomes legal in the next 5 years I think poker will avoid going the way of bridge or golf where the playing pool age rises every year due to fewer young people playing.

Not to be impertinent, but how old are you?

The early 2000s were quite possibly the golden age of online entertainment. The Internet was mature enough to technologically support most of what people wanted to do but nobody had made a massive push to make money off of it yet.

All sorts of online casinos proliferated - I remember learning poker with my friends on Yahoo Games. People routinely exchanged games, movies, and music on Napster or Kazaa. Nobody signed up for sites with their real names.

None of this was mobile, granted, but it was a great time for online entertainment.

Granted, I don't have data to support this, but I'd have to imagine that the amount of time spent "online" in 2004 by an 18-30 year old is a fraction of what he or she now spends on his or her phone or other mobile devices. People played poker online because they were online, plus the coverage was all over ESPN, which - again, I don't have data to back this up, but feel pretty confident in my position - likely had far, far more live TV viewers back then from that demographic than they do today.

Poker today is an afterthought to 18-30 year-olds, if even a thought at all. And that afterthought is sort of like the way every successive generation views what was popular with the previous generation - a combination of puzzlement and derision, or certainly not a rush to emulate what was hot back in the day. Sure - maybe someday there will be nostalgia for poker like there seems to be for things that were big back in the day, but considering the nostalgia movement these days is the 90s, that means about ten years of waiting for the poker wave to hit again.

Of course if it becomes legal in the US soon, all bets are off, yet even still you can count me among those who wonders if it will ever go back to the levels it once was. Most 18-30 year olds would be more lured in these days by Fortnite tournaments (and the like) than poker, I'd have to think.

That might be true for lots of things but not so much for ESPN stuff. 30 years ago, Football was the #1 sports in the US, followed by Baseball and soccer was the #1 sports worldwide. That did not change.

Bad comparison IMO. Those are participation sports which generations of people have been bombarded with from infancy to old page and which are considered national past times. Poker is a fringe "sport", much like Jai Alai, which was also popular for a while then basically died out.

Sure, but the total amount of time people spent on entertainment in 2004 is roughly the same. It's just online entertainment was a smaller fraction of total entertainment.

Poker wasn't popular because people had nothing to do. It was a fad, like World of Warcraft, or the Atkins Diet.

Interesting note on this topic: A number of online sports gambling sites will take bets on the WSOP Main Event. One of the bets is an O/U on the age of the winner of the Main Event. This year that number most places is 26.5. That being said, 9/10 Main Events were won by someone under that number. There's still a large collection of young players out there. I honestly think some of it depends upon when you play.

I mostly play daytime poker. I'm 36 years old and I have a white collar job that allows me a certain amount of freedom. I probably play 3 times a week and it's always between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM as I do all I can to get home for dinner and bedtime with young kids.

Playing mostly 2-5 NLHE and 2-5 PLO, I find I'm still on the young side of most of the players at my table on a daily basis. That changes the more I play into the night and on the rare occasions when I play weekend nights, I'd say more than half the table is younger than I am. This is in midwest poker room that is busy but not huge (25 tables, probably have 12 tables busy during the day with 2 or 3 2-5 games going at any given time and one PLO game).

This should not come as a surprise. The key figure to know would be the average age of the field, not how old the winner is or even the average age of those who cash.

The comparison to jai alai doesn't really seen fair. Jai alai was only ever briefly popular because in some major jurisdictions it was the only live sport that it was legal to bet on. But it was never a very common participation sport. I'd bet 100 times as many people in the US have played poker recreationally as have played jai alai, and that might even have been true when jai alai was at its peak.

I'm not the most educated on the top seeing as how I've only been playing for five years. However, based on my experience, it's very dependent on where you play and at what time, as others have mentioned. In Tampa FL, there was rarely an individual at the table that was younger than 30 or 35. In Detroit, the demographic seemed to be younger, 30s-40s. IMO, most people who play frequently are older, and any young players you see playing as frequently are "grinders", not rec players, and it seems in live casino poker in areas other than Vegas, those are few and far between.

Doug Polk just said in his last video that young people's participation was radically slashed by Black Friday, a good point, it's hard to get started now for little cash unlike in 2005.

It seems this way too me too. Gambling in general. I don't see the craps tab!e fill ed with people who look like they probably needed a fake id near as often as I used to.

I haven't noticed a big difference here in my area. Echoing what others have said above, it's definitely day/time dependent with weekends/weekend nights skewing younger than 11am on a Tuesday. Sadly I've just crossed the MAG threshold, but the younger guys I've seen playing in the daytime (I fall into the weekend nights category, mostly) are generally pros/wannabe pros.

Tend to agree with akadar that the bigger poker markets like Vegas, LA, NJ, etc. will have a younger overall demo than more regional areas in my experience.

Ten years ago, literally every single college student knew somebody at their school who was making money playing poker online. This is not the case today.