People cry so much for no reason. I mean, yes, no one should realistically expect to get rich, or make a decent living by most countries standards, but you can still achieve a positive winrate at stakes high enough to compensate you for your effort/time and pay for the tools of improvement, way more than chess (that people still play and put effort as a hobby nonetheless), while still being an interesting strategy game to play. You just need to not be intellectually or emotionally impaired and have the discipline to put the required effort.

Now paying for the monthly solver instead of the monthly book.

There are quite a few Americans who play a combo of live and online who earn a very healthy living. If you throw in videos and coaching...some are doing quite well.

It would do you far better these days.

Have jumped on the train, out of laziness

Have fond memories of the books though...

That's why I said that in many locales you can't even find a bookstore. I, too, am old enough to think that's sheer madness compared to what it was like when I was growing up. I'm 41 now. I miss the old school malls that sometimes even had two bookstores that were quite large and had coffee shops, food, etc.

Not so much anymore. I'm about as nostalgic of a person as could be.

I'm so old I'm beyond nostalgic.

The chess section took up 2 or more shelves. If you are booming people are going to sell you all sorts of ****. I have to believe chess has if not has more sorts of solvers and RTA's but people are/were recently buying up the books to have so much stock.

This was at Barnes & Nobles which seems to be doing good again and expanding. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/07/11612...-time-in-years

edit: just checking amazon the best selling chess book is currently #52 right behind Arnold Schwarzenegger new book. The current best selling poker book is sitting comfortably at #16,566. That's not because of real time solves and training sites. It's because poker is a dead game to the general public. If it had any life people would be trying to sell you all sorts of stuff.

I use GTO+ and GTOWizard Premium lol.

I actually love Chess. The thing is that at a certain level, you need to treat it pretty much full time like poker to continue to progress. If you progress. With virtually zero opportunity to make any amount of money. This has always prevented me from playing regular OTB tournament Chess. I know I just wouldn't be able to justify keeping up with it. I'm 41.

Poker, on the other hand, is actually more enjoyable to me at this point and I love the solvers, software, and AI we have involved in the game now. They're really interesting to me. Lastly, but of course not least, is $$. If a game I'm playing doesn't have money or something of value to gain...I'm never going to treat it as seriously as my opponents. That's etched in stone by now. That's never going to change about me at this point.

But I'm glad Chess is doing well. I don't want to talk about it much more because I could easily find myself being dragged away from poker for the rest of the day, and playing online Chess. I just have to be disciplined at this point and save that time/energy for poker. I'm currently working on planning my poker hands out like I would a move of Chess. Understanding the potential tree down to the river before deciding how to act on the flop, for example.

Just as a footnote to this: Chess doing well also gives me hope about a stream of new players into poker down the line. Many of these kids you see playing chess at like 12-15 years old - and are really serious about it - have a plan to either be a chess player or a chess teacher. Neither of which is at all realistically going to provide someone with a livable wage. So, even though they're told this now, they just don't listen. After high school ends and time begins to move on, many of these kids will naturally be forced to spend less time on Chess and more time on relationships and money. There's really no game that would appeal to them more than poker at that point.

I was at the grocery store and I saw the common thing happen where two middle aged ladies who kinda know each other see each other and exclaim and start talking in an animated fashion. It started with pleasantries but I was shocked that the conversation actually turned to the HCL lineup this week pretty quickly. BOOM

Poker Boom 2.0 comes when a hot girl wins the Main Event or maybe some 25yo or younger guy

haha I see what you did there. It is a bit different though as books quickly become outdated as poker evolves, whereas solvers and especially the more powerful AI that has sprung up and joined forces with GTOW have gotten much closer to the answers than the books did which were of course written by man.

In any case, if you're paying monthly for a particular solver you better be making enough money to offset that.

GTO Wizard's elite is just amazing.

How about we compare youtube and twitch channels in 2008 and 2023?

Not even a blip.

Turns out that paying 10% of every hand to some tax-dodging overseas online casino while getting scammed by some Russian bot rings at 0.01/0.02 NL wasn't so fun in the long run.

The cool kids nowadays hang on r/wallstreetbets and dust their money off with leveraged crypto CFDs.

2nd boom ended months ago, Op…. Sorry…

Have a lot of negativity from players who seem to have done well in the past but not so much today. Boom or not: The games are still very much alive and beatable. The thing is that if you want to sit down and learn a game where you can directly earn money...what else are you going to play? Right - there really aren't any other options. You can play Chess, spend years getting great, and then play in a tournament where you might win like $300 if you outlast a field of 12 IM's who have been playing since they're three. That's like literally your only other option.

So, poker isn't going anywhere but of course, some of it's players will now and then.

There will never be another Poker Boom, but maybe we get a Poker Blip if a hot girl wins the Main Event. Nobody wants to see another socially awkward, under 25-year-old college dropout win the Main Event (except other socially awkward, under 25-year-old college drop outs).

You're moving goal posts. The topic is whether or not this is boom 2.0 not wether or not games are alive and beatable.

Magic the gathering
Hearthstone

Fair enough. That's accurate. The games are alive and beatable (online and off) but obviously they're much harder than they used to be. As for the boom: I agree with you that there's no boom occurring atm.

Yeah, exactly. I think poker has a slightly higher yield if you're a winner.

Truth be told: I used to be heavily into mmorgps. This was many years ago now. The games you mention won't pull me away from poker but they don't entirely disinterest me, either.

The effort required to make 100k a year playing mtg right now is similar to the effort required to make 100k at online poker. In the future, as more people look for gaming to include more of an element of , you know, actual gaming as opposed to an aggressive house edge , I would expect games like mtg to be big gambling games.