the koreans will see that poker is profitable and switch over from StarCraft and start dominating.

Live poker will always be profitable.
Online will continue to dwindle as bots and grinders living in places where $5/h is nice money continue to proliferate.

Most of the world will be worse off then it is now economy wise. People will be fiending to deposit online and make manies to feed their family. Phil Ivey will be President and bring poker to the world.

that would be a nightmare.

The highstakes games accross the Internet will have been taken over by the elite facebook poker players who currently have billions of chips. The current stars such as sauce123 and nutsinho will be grinding 3/6 after being beaten down by some of the facebook wizzkids. The rest of us will ne in NVG talking about how easy the games were 10years ago when nobody was quadruple range merging.

Poker? Where we're going Marty, there is no poker.

we'll see multiple mega sites serving the US, with playerpools linked in networks with other regulated countries like France Italy Germany Australia UK and others.

Facebook and yahoo will offer real money poker, sparking a boom of popularity with the now "safe" and "legal" online games.

Sunday tournaments will regularly have $1M first prizes.

there will be $100 180man sngs filling up one a minute at peak hours on the biggest networks.

ring games up to 0.25/0.50 nl will be unbelievably soft regardless of if there are multi-table caps in place.

microstakes will be intensely popular, with networks hosting one million players online at peak hours, requiring multiple servers like WoW.

people will be playing pokerstars on their iphone 10s in their automated flying cars

For the US:


-35+ states playing in an interstate pool

-3-4 "top dogs" (Ceasars, MGM, Wynn, etc.) each with well over 100,000 players at peak hours


-Similar rake structures to modern times (I'm guessing 20% tax on site REVENUES, but no absurd banking fees so sites will have manageable rake and competition to ensure lower rates)


-Maybe international player pool, if so the sites will have near double the peak traffic




Things will be very solid for much longer. During the boom era (04-10) there was a significant increase in the quality of play and significant decrease in player traffic year to year. While both of these things will happen in the new market they will trend at a much, much slower rate and I'm confident games will be profitable for well over a decade, assuming the government and the companies can keep bots at bay and ensure consumer protection (I think they will).




It's a very bright future, but getting there is the hard part.

It will look like this ...

There will be no more screen names you will be given a # most tables you can play is 2 if you profit at all you will be banned from the site for a while. Software will be garbage, Getting funds on and off will continue to suck, this is only for US players.

If you live elsewhere and can still play on stars everything will be even better than it is now. More Players, inprovements, new games possibly a new rush type format, great support.

B R I C

Brasil

Russia

India

China

2012 is the end of the world

More lasers and even higher definition. Chips that shuffle themselves. Madness...