Regarding rake : there was a rake free site for a long time during the boom and it never took off and bit the dust.

There are also many sites where its possible to get huge RB deals of nearly all your paid rake back, they are suffering at the moment as well.

Any site needs to give a decent volume of rb/rewards/promotions/some combo to satisfy everyone from the occasional rec to huge SNE level grinder - but it has pretty much no bearing on a possible boom.

How many people have made a living playing Candy Crush and watching netflix? How can these be compared?
Poker has the appeal of making money and gambling....are casinos just another fad? Pretty sure casinos have been going strong for a long time because people love to gamble. Online Poker creates an easy, fun and competitive way to do this, and if you're good enough you can make a living off it.There is still a huge number of people playing on stars, and that's with what was the biggest market for them in the US dead. The world series of poker still attracts huge numbers, people still love poker. If US players can be injected back into the online market, with a centralised good website who get the formulae right with rake, advertising, making it appealing to recs etc, there is no reason it cannot boom again....perhaps not as much as it once did, but I think injecting hundreds of thousands of players into the existing market which is still relatively popular where you can already make money would still be considered a boom.

There are a lot of if's though with regulating, raking and tax though.....so I guess we'll have to wait and see

It will happen but not for a while I think.

Its going to totally depend on a free online market which is going to take a lot of work to achieve.

as long as boomswitches still happen im good

Nerd culture was catching on and becoming popular before that show. The show was able to capitalize on this at the right time.

first off "gambling" is never old hat. its like prostitution its awesome and its been around and will be around forever. you said you dont follow the politics that closely but you make statements like there fact. maybe you should take that negative energy and do some research.

I said poker is old hat, not gambling. Perhaps you could focus your nitpicking energy into reading better. And yes, I posted this as i wanted to learn, that should be obvious?

The next poker 'boom' won't happen overnight ala Moneymaker imo.
Instead, as the global economy improves, more and more people will have disposable income to play poker with.
Black-Friday might have killed online poker in the US, but the GFC had massively dampened the poker economy already.

All poker needs id deregulation & legality around the world.

May never be like what it was in 2003 but would be semi close ide have to imagine.

no more poker boom, everybody is solid

Don't forget that poker boom #1 just also happened to coincide with the biggest credit bubble in the history of the world....

reasonable points but Poker has the added allure for the average Joe to make millions of $ unlike Candy Crush etc.

Still I agree it's peaked.

So what your saying is because she is gay? I guess there aren't any other gay women in the world. What a shame.

The reality is most people player poker for entertainment. The casual digital entertainment market has changed markedly and there are a million options.

Online poker is slipping into what b&m poker was before the boom. Degens trading money and nothing more.

There will not be a huge boom again, you are right. Since the US is likely to be rolled out piecemeal it will never boom, even for a short period of time.

Casual players will drop $20 and then go back to their tablet and phone games, tv shows, videos and movies.

In fact most casuals will likely end up playing on an app on a service with no multi tabling and totally grinder unfriendly. That kind of service will dominant the US marketplace. Not one based on 24 tabling, bonus and point systems and all the other things most people will not care about.

The service that lets you send digital stickers to your friends you play with will triumph. Even if active players grew significantly from current levels, most of the new players and a chunk of old players will end up using super casual friendly sites.

Sure there may be some good short term arbitrage opportunities but otherwise...

Yeah rake is not going to be a factor. Things like sending stickers, gifts and a large selection of avatars will be more important.

Don't you think the people that care about sending each other virtual drinks at the table will stay on play games like the ones on Facebook or whatever?

I think there is a difference between recreational players in that there are some that probably are ok with playing play money or 2NL and then there are some that are still recreational players but want to play larger games. The ones that play the larger games aren't going to care about stickers, gifts, or avatars.

Yes, I'm saying she's gay, I didn't think it was that hard to figure out what I meant. Maybe I should have used smaller words for you. By estimates of the gay community (which are probably high estimates, but it really doesn't matter) 10% of the population is gay. It's pretty hard to start a new poker boom by influencing at most 10% of the population. Sorry if I'm not PC enough for you, but that's marketing

Germany has no restrictions on deposits, neither does Great Britain. Neither country has the supply of donkeys and passive fish that they had 10 years ago. The super idiots that fueled Party Poker have either given up gambling or doing what they should have done years ago play slot machines....

A sustainable model does not equal a poker boom. Not many losing players think about how much rake they're paying; they don't have to pay it in the long-run.
Frequent deposit bonuses and incentives may bring back former players and keep existing players in the net.

Speaking from the UK I see a lot of casino-based gambling adverts on TV, but I don't see many poker ads any more. I think there needs to be a sustained media campaign, and it needs to be done sooner rather than later. I don't think we're too far away from a huge regulation on gambling advertisements in a similar way to smoking ads (complete ban) and alcohol ads (restriction on over-glamourising).

Imagine Justin Bieber won the main event though..

I broadly agree with you, and I made the Unibet rake schedule. It's much lower at the bottom end than most sites because it keeps new players alive for longer (one of our main aims) and because more players will move up. The rake is the same (or a bit higher) at higher stake games.

Keeping new players alive for longer is also why we don't have HUDs, trackers or table selection, and we allow alias changes.

I think the future of poker is selling it as entertainment that you can happen to win money at. So I think they're direct competitors.

Just thought I'd mention we're advertising in the UK and in Sweden and likely in a few more countries in the near future

The 2003-2007 poker boom (when very few player knew any poker strategy):




Any future poker boom (with an army of East-European nit-farmers waiting in the wings):




Juk

While this poster tossed this out there BBV style, the real debate about future poker booms probably can be based around it, because the context of "poker booms" as described in this thread are essentially "when making money was easy."

Making money was indeed very easy for everyone in the 2002-8ish range, because the industry was exploding and the bonuses and incentives offered at the time were insane and unsustainable.

A fun read about those times is the following:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...d-days-676038/


The games were already getting generally tougher (and the industry was starting to consolidate/mature) by the time Black Friday hit, and that certainly escalated the process by removing a large chunk of the casual player base.

Even if you take away Black Friday, the games by now would not be dramatically different in terms of quality though perhaps another room would be of significant size like Pokerstars (which as has been said in the thread is considerably bigger now than it was before Black Friday).

As any industry matures the incentives and benefits reach a more stable point (usually lower for the customer), and we are seeing that now.

I agree a general rake reduction would be nice to see, but the marketplace seems relatively content with it as it is now as long as sites continue to innovate the games they offer (Zoom, mobile access, etc).

The famous poker on TV aspect of all of this fit the growth period a decade ago, but with or without Black Friday that too was an unsustainable part of the equation and by now it would have been dialed back considerably, where "Raisy Daisy" and the dude with the shark become a fond memory anyway.

Shows of D level celebrities playing poker never had an expected long term shelf life, just like shows about hoarders and other things come and go, and while that element added a jolt at a growth time of the industry, it would have minimal place at this point, which is why whether a female looks like Rosanne Barr or not winning something has minimal impact at this time.

From the staking side I can say first hand that the profile of the player has changed considerable from the "I wanna be on TV/famous" to the "I want to make a decent living doing an activity I enjoy" and that is much more sustainable and realistic. The players need to work much harder than they did 8-10 years ago, but that is typical of anything. Watch teh TV show Survivor and watch the play level in seasons 1-3 and compare it to the newer seasons. No comparison, and the same applies to any athletic activity as well. Poker players seem a bit frustrated accepting this general reality.

The industry is actually healthier now than it was, and hopefully the legislative side will sort its way out over the next several years in a positive manner (which has happened in some countries, and not so much in others (ie: Greece). Governments are always a huge unknown in any equation because they have huge power and often times minimal common sense.

To conclude this tiny manifesto, I can say first hand from staking a considerable amount of players for over 5 years, and having been a very active participant in the "good old days" that the industry as it is today represents a much more stable long term future for those willing to put the time and effort needed to succeed.

I agree with a lot of your post, but the industry is still contracting pretty rapidly. Globally it's down 8% year on year if you go by PokerScout numbers.

Much of that contraction is due to approaches to the industry that used to work (rakeback shops with under the table deals on shady skins, mass tabling, playing 6+ rooms at the same time etc) does not work any more. To use a cliche, it is all part of growing up, as happens in the mature phase in any industry.

The real wild card are how governments will handle the industry, as they can clumsily help it or really hurt it without knowing what they are doing. Black Friday was an extreme, short term version of this.