Right in the face

I had just turned 20 when Black Friday happened and was living in Vegas at the time. Moved to Mexico, have lived here ever since and go to the US 2 times per year max.

Just turned 26 2 months ago, still click click derping away. Know a lot of poker friends that were ~ my age have given it up or just play as their side income online+live. Over time, the Rosarito poker community has shrank quite a bit; used to run into poker players all around town and now there are only a handful left...game is certainly getting tougher and many players are choosing to move on

i play live all over florida i gotta say if i had to guess id say less than 8% of players are 20-26 age range. i think the game will continue to go in the direction it was pre boom. that age range doesny have the income or the time imo.

Nah bro I ****ing tracked down and tagged all these 21yo's like an expert pedophile.


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I play on the east coast (DMV area) and there seem to be a lot of 20-30 year olds who play full time. It seems true though that the barrier to entry for poker is slightly higher/harder without the option of online play. While online is surely tougher, you don't need as much money to start a roll and you don't have to physically go to a casino. Also I feel like the softness of live low stakes games leads some of these guys to table up in stakes too quickly and inevitably bust. The depressing reality about grinding live poker is a lot of your income will come from middle aged to elderly men blowing through savings/retirement/etc. Millenials don't have enough disposable income for casual poker play to be a widespread interest. However, I do believe that the ones who take it seriously are some of the best/highest potential players right now. For context, I'm 28 and played a ton of live poker throughout high school/college and followed the online scene but never really played much myself. I stopped playing seriously for a time during college because of other interests but started playing again when MD Live opened up. With the extreme softness of live poker I don't really have much interest in online poker, unless it was instantly going to attract hordes of fish.

I think you may be onto something...

I am a 24 year old American. Used to watch ESPN all day as a kid and naturally got hooked on poker as that used to be all they showed late at night. Played underage with my mom's name on Full Tilt. Was not a winner. Turned 18 and deposited $20 under my own name on Poker Stars. When Black Friday hit two months later, I was down to $2. Started driving to a 18+ casino a few hours away every now and then with money I saved up as a Chinese food delivery driver. Would usually lose about $200 per trip. Then one time they had one of those big rake trap huge re-entry tourneys for $200. Naturally, I shipped 1st place for $33k. Dropped out of college to become a live pro because I was clearly the **** after winning a live donkament. Had some ups and downs in the beginning, but read some books and gained more experience and was able to beat 1/3 and 2/5 pretty good for awhile. That lasted about four years and I got bored of playing live low stakes everyday and decided to go back to school. I play a decent bit on ACR now but really more to just pass the time then anything. No real ambition to get to the highest stakes or be the best like I had when I was 18. Am proud to say that I have withdrawn 5x more than I have deposited this time around in online poker. Will always play poker, glad to have it as just a hobby now though.

In my case, hobbies include posting pointless graphs on poker forums, moaning about pesky kids 4-bet bluffing me, and shouting at clouds.

You're 45? When I read your PGC I assumed you were like.. 20, with a very good idea of life

Black Friday was probably the best thing for my career (I started playing after BF). I'm American- just turned 23.

How can BF have been the best thing for your career?

I just turned 24 and have played full time on U.S. sites since graduating college. There's money to be made if you're willing to suspend your disbelief at the lol softwares + management of these sites.

Occasionally I talk to someone who's like "I thought online poker ended in the U.S. back in 2011" and I'm just floored, like wtf, do you live under a rock? Have you ever heard of google?

I think your responses are going to be a bit skewed. If they are not playing poker, then why would they be on a poker site? All the 20-somethings that reply here are going to say they play poker.

I guess they may know what their non-poker playing friends are doing. Or not. Poker players are a bit reclusive anyway and the 20-somethings are a bit self-absorbed to know what their friends are into.

Not throwing stones, just an observation. Glass houses, etc., etc. Hell, I don't know what my friends are into these days.

Just playing live now. Having more fun and making more hourly (but less total) than I ever did online anyways.

But most people would probably guess I was never an online player. Unlike all the dumbasses that sit there and grind online while they play live, and use poker lingo and strat talk at the table and discuss winrates and then wonder why all the fish are disappearing.

I'm confused, you think that someone who plays an online table on a device while playing live is an "online player"?? No, that's a live player with an iPad.

IME fwiw (and I know this is a bit off topic but I wasn't the one to take it there), the guys who show up talking strat at poker tables irl are mostly part time/full time live players who have some combination of the following:

- don't think what they say has any effect on their environment, because whales are gonna whale, etc.

- are too lazy to work on their poker game but smart/self-aware enough to know that higher level strat does exist. some are even mildly self-conscious about the fact that they play live, because they're aware of what "online players" think of them, rightly or wrongly.

- have some chip on their shoulder/ego thing going on with other young players there where they feel they have to "save face" by "knowing their ****", despite its total lack of relevance to being successful in their games


3) usually supersedes consideration of the potential negative effects of 1), because, well, ego is ego.


My experience of going to casinos is often that someone there, usually another player in his 20's, pegs me as the "online guy", and proceeds to sort of engage me in some kind of strat discussion, to signify to me that despite this live game being his turf and his thing, he also knows the higher level stuff, thank you very much. This narrative of the autistic basement-dwelling button clicker venturing out into the live games and lacking social skills is pretty off base, imo.

Other than the above 3 sentences, you didn't seem to grasp what I was saying.

Many players used to play online because the games were good, and now as online games have gotten worse and worse many of these players have switched to being live players, like myself.

However, a smart live player engages at the table in relaxed conversation, and keeps strat talk, winrate talk, etc. to an absolute minimum. Having another game going on your tablet in front of you is terrible for the atmosphere of the game (far worse than watching a movie on your tablet).

Smart live players save any serious poker discussion for time away from the table.

And I'm assuming that when we talk about the ages 20-26, we are referring to people who were that age during the online years, and now if they are still in poker in their 30's, are grinding live games.

I wasn't just responding to your post. This topic of live vs. online players keeps coming up itt even though it's off topic, and I was responding to this general discussion. Maybe I incorrectly lumped you into a "camp".

Pretty sure OP is talking about people that are 20-26 now, and would have had the U.S. ban on poker come down when they were 15-16, which is when a lot of people that end up playing poker full time get their start with it as a hobby.

Yeah you're right.

I guess I imagined that the success stories of the poker book were mostly college kids, many of whom dropped out (myself being an example). We were 20-26 then, and most of us are more like 30-36 now. I misunderstood.

Off topic, I'm currently 24 and mostly play online in the microstakes for the past 7 months. I didn't know anything about Black Friday or the good ol' days of online poker. Now I'm a regular grinder on BetOnline trying to go up stakes from $0.01/$0.02 from a starting $0 account (currently at $12.40), but getting regularly owned by donks. Though, managed to learn what ranges I'm comfortable playing with and picked up strategies from watching videos from Doug Polk, Alec Torelli, Andrew Neeme, The Trooper, WSOP Main Event, and etc. All of these experiences have translated pretty well to my live skills at bar freerolls and 4 live cash games.

Coming from Texas, there's still a good amount of fish out there even with all the information you can look up. Last cash game I played in was full of fish and donks. Stacked two of them when they made very bad calls and they're regular players. Nice thing, no one talked about strategy on the table. I did provide one guy with a few tips but nothing that he couldn't figure out on his own. I can say, poker is still not full of "GTO" players. Even the young players can still be picked off with all the information at their finger tips. Information is useless if they don't know how to use it.

∆∆∆∆ as soon as you bet I fold

Then sit there smug knowing you had two pair or better

Member when you folded river flush because it pair the board

And you sat there thinking young made a good fold, guess what is was not

That is how you play poker.

There's probably a whole lot less ***** tits going on with them.

They have moved on to Safe Space Developement and teaching children of the generation after them about being ladyboys and mangirls and why it is bad to have winners and losers cause everyone is a special snowflake.

They also work vigorously on organizing riots which they disguise as "protests/demonstrations" so they can have there temper tantrums and break stuff in an attempt to get their way. Not too dissimilar to when they were spoiled little pricks manipulating their weak passive parents whos idea of parenting was to give the little ****s whatever the want so they stfu and stop crying, then stick em in front of the tv for SpongeBob and video games the rest of the day.

Edit: Also, LBGTQIA & the Be-Nice-To-Mooslims-You-LoLRacist campaigns as well

Sounds like a good argument for online poker.

Someone once criticised Winston Churchhill for drinking so much during WWII. He replied "I got more out of alcohol than alcohol got out of me."

Sounds like you guys above got more out of poker than poker got out of you. Especially the guy who believes poker kept him and his friends off drugs.

Am 23 and American. Started playing around when I made my 2p2 account. Still playing, now as a full-time pro making okay money for where I'm at in the world (thanks Southeast Asia).

Wtf is this thread even?

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