a massive exaggeration

derp

I mean, yeah, if you're used to playing dumbass, ultra-slow 30-hands-an-hour live poker, I'm sure online seems impossibly tough. I only play live a couple times a year, but frankly, I'm not sure I've EVER met a non-terrible live player at 2/5 and 5/10.

Your pretty naive if you don't think things have changed since 2017-2018 . 6-7 years is a lifetime when it comes to technology and online play. I do agree somewhat that a closed pool of American players on a site can still have soft games, but not a large player pool or very high stakes at the moment.

By, "I doubt things have changed too much in this regard since then", I'm referring to the desire of Americans (the vast majority of whom being fish) to play online poker. Nobody can provide proof of that, but it seems like a normal assertion to me. Americans still like to gamble, many of them don't live particularly close to a decent cardroom/casino, and many of them want more action than live poker provides.

RTA and bots are a thing, I don't deny it, and of course the sophistication of them advances with time (presumably detection of them does as well), but the degree to which they dominate online poker is massively overstated by people ITT and by posters in general.

On weekends, March Madness/Super Bowl, etc., 200z and 500z are soft as all hell on Ignition. Sufficiently high stakes to make a nice living, and 200z runs almost 24/7. There's a 15-second time limit for all actions, and I'm unaware of any RTA that is fast enough for anybody to get use from it. No chance of there being enough time to use GTOw or Pio or anything of which I'm aware. Maybe someone can build some custom RTA which can handle it...

Is it? I have 20 rec friends that love poker and grew up during the boom, maybe 1 of them cares enough these days to deposit money on an online site. If you're a normal guy with a job, maybe wife/kids, and some hobbies, spending 5-10 hours clicking buttons on your computer to make $20 at microstakes is probably far down on your list of enjoyable ways to spend your time. This is all if you're "decent" at poker and not your average bro just trying to have fun. Cool, so you spend 5 hours to make enough money to buy McDonalds for one.

Sounds like you should play more live like the rest of us? Idkkkkkkkkkkkk Also never said online is tough, just less profitable and higher chance of being cheated compared to live, IMO. I do like being able to play without leaving the house tho, big adv to online.

From the point of view of the fun players, there is essentially no difference between an infestation of bots and a population of massively multitabling rakeback and leaderboard grinders. So from the fun players' point of view, there is little difference between the situation of online poker now and five years ago.

It is the massively multitabling rakeback and leaderboard grinders who feel the heat from the bots.

So if bots really are an existential threat to online poker, what does that say about multitabling grinders?

In any event, despite the bots, despite RTA, despite stables of players trained with MDA from dubiously obtained hand history databases, online poker is healthier now than it was in May, 2011, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

Online is boring as hell and about low win rates while getting in high volume. If you think online poker isn't rife with collusion RTA etc I have a bridge to sell you.

That doesn't mean it's not bearable but those are pretty good reasons for recs not to play.

And it's obviously going to continue to get worse as computing power increases.

If poker as a whole is declining, than PLO is declining less than NL.

PLO may be growing as NL declines.

PLO is gaining some of the NL players, but NL is not gaining any new PLO players.

-from an exclusive PLO POV