The Poker Boom in the USA in the mid 2000s was truly incredible. Everyone was playing online; there were non stop poker tv shows; poker pros had celebrity/rock star status. I was playing during that time. It was amazing!

In my opinion the Boom was due to:

1. Chris Moneymaker winning the 2003 WSOP Main Event from a $35 satellite he won on PokerStars. He was Joe Average yet he beat all the top pros to become the World Champion and he won $2.5Million;

2. The large number of online poker sites available to US citizens including FullTilt; PokerStars; Party Poker; UltimateBet; Absolute; Doyles Room, Bodog, etc. Even Baywatch's Pamela Anderson had her own site called PamelaPoker.com;

3. The inception of the WPT which was broadcast every week on the Travel Channel bringing glamorous poker tournaments with huge prizes into everyone's home on a weekly basis;

4. The above 3 happened right after one of the most horrible stock market crashes in history - the dotcom bubble bursting. Everyone was looking for alternative ways to make money since the stock market was no longer an option. Online poker was looking very attractive especially since Moneymaker showed the world that the pros could be beaten by a regular guy who played online in his spare time.

++What do you think? Could this ever be replicated again? Could poker in the USA ever be as big and as glorious as it was in the mid 2000s?

No.

perfect answer. /thread

Not before they invent something as revolutionary as the hole card cameras.

Never and anyone who thinks the current "book" is remotely close to that one is either super young or insane.
Legalize online poker in the entire US tomorrow and it will be nothing like back then.

I have to agree because legal online poker is only one of the 4 factors that I think made poker great back then

If main stream poker became decentralized and every country could access it easily like 10 years ago

Nope. When you go on YouTube for poker videos and see Berkey with his backwards hat spewing terms like asymptotic merge betting, exploitative value call, seismic showdown value pivots, GTO 5 bet induce, and synergetic global ranges - that is precisely why poker will never ever boom again.

As with all things truly special, it's compounding factors that all acted on each other and would be impossible to duplicate again.

Hole card cameras, Moneymaker (and all relevant factors there), poker being extremely fresh in the public consciousness and this relatively new thing (because yeah, as weird as it is to say it, the internet was a 'relatively new thing' back in the early 00s), being able to play on the computer, via the information superhighway, for real money.

You'll never duplicate those conditions again, simply because you cannot.

One thing that has gotten basically zero talk in this discussion whenever it pops up- but is right there in the very tippy-top most relevant factors that drove the initial boom- was what ESPN did in 2003 with the production values of their televised poker coverage. Revisiting the old WSOPs via the PokerGo service makes it blindingly obvious, but hard to pick up on at the time.

Watch Pre-Moneymaker WSOPs and you see the ebb and flow of how many f**ks were given to televised poker at the time among TV top brass.
The early days, it was a quirky thing.
The Chris Marlowe/Chip Reese era and the green chutes of poker being taken seriously on TV, real high points like Ungar in 97, but it regressed pretty bad, until it was given no attention at all. One year it would be decent, the next year, an afterthought. For the nut low WSOP, see the 1999 airing of the Binions In-House produced, VHS only, Wilfred Brimley-Hosted coverage of Noel Furlong's win. It should be preserved as some sort of case-study in incredibly shitty television production, which was the WSOP on TV, a mere 4 years before Moneymaker.

For whatever reason, in 2003, someone at ESPN decided to put A-Team production talent on that years airing of the World Series of Poker... and it absolutely oozed from the end product. Totally ignoring the 'Moneymaker' byline, the $35 satellite, the name and just going on production value and format quality alone, what they did with the 2003 WSOP was very special and would've probably set off the poker boom, Moneymaker or not. It was that good, compared with productions of years ago, and dumped gas on an existing fire that had been showing rapid growth since Rounders.

I'll say it here again, though. The most underappreciated Y factor in the poker boom was the production quality and innovative formatting of the creatives at ESPN who made a decision to up the game on televised poker in 2002 and delivered something special the year later.

Poker was there waiting to boom at least once, everybody knew something about it, I played some five card draw in school decades earlier, and holdem, kind of end of the evolution, is a very balanced and good game.

Especially online it will be difficult to boom, as the word spreads the game is solved. You have to play (as always) against the house, but also against those who have solved it. Quite a task.

Something I can't believe no one has mentioned

It was pre-2008, and people were flush with cash. Not only that, getting the money online via credit card was incredibly easy. That all ended one fateful December night thanks to John Kyl, Bill Frist, and the UIGEA

Definitely a huge factor, along with everything else

I 100% agree with this. The production with ESPN in the early 2000's was so much better. They did features on players, giving their backstories. You knew that Moneymaker was an underdog. You knew about the history of Mike Matusow and his struggles to get back on the felt. You saw Chris Ferguson throwing a card at a carrot and cutting it in half. Phil Gordon's paper, rock scissors tourney. The tv table had the personalities, and the hosts were entertaining. Norman Chad and Lon McEachern. I really wish the WSOP production would go back to this.

The biggest problem they ran into is that players quickly became aware of the cameras and started playing to them. Coverage no longer felt like a candid documentary, and more like someone putting on a performance in front of the camera (usually a shitty, and unentertaining performance). There are other factors, but I think this is the main reason people eventually stopped tuning in.

Yeah it will if chris moneymaker wins again

Lock it up

Most people always miss bubbles because they focus too much in the past, and hoping for repeats, instead of just being open minded and waiting. 99.9% of probability the next big bubble will not be crypto, and will definitely not be poker

When Global Poker had easy PayPal deposits, there were multiple 2k tables running. If it was legalized fully throughout the USA with easy deposit options, there would definitely be a mini boom, like during covid. I don’t think it would be sustainable, though. Whales lose too quickly online.

Sadly with how the covid mini-boom played out, I lost all hope.

If the online poker sites were a little bit smarter, instead of squeezing all of the juice from whales by implementing unlimited rebuy and addon tournaments they could have used a more sustainable schedule/game format and the fish would play for longer.

Also regs are so much better these days that any whales that come into the game get killed instantly and it is probably only gonna get worse.

Maybe a new game type will be the revival of poker, for example I had high hopes for the PLO5 games, but at this point I am not sure.

Also something people dont talk about enough IMO is how the poker sites are changing their business model. Just look at GG. They have like 90% market share and instead of supporting the poker dream to get more players into the game (and more recreationals) they just increase the rake endlessly, to the point where any real winrate on the cash tables is almost impossible (the best regs with reasonable samples have like 2-4bb/100 and I am talking about the absolute topregs) because of the scam high rake. Not even mentioning their warnings and threats to ban winning regs because of "bum hunting". Really sad.

What is the incentive for any of these sites to change their rake structure? You said it yourself, GG has 90% market share while having unbeatable rake. The people have spoken and they don’t give a **** about rake.

Why would these sites be interested in the long term sustainability of the games? Their player base is aging and there aren’t waves of new young players signing up to play online. The people making these decisions will just move into management positions at another company if they truly do cannibalize themselves. They’re smart for milking poker for as much as possible while they can. The inability to guarantee fair games is already looming large, surrounding online poker’s future health with a ton of uncertainty.

Milking the whales for as much as possible in a short period of time is just smart business. The regs have no spines and will just play wherever the whales play so there’s no threat of losing their business. Bottom line is poker isn’t that much fun when you’re losing. The whales are going to get bored long before they run out of money so it’s not like the extreme rake has any impact on how long these guys play.

On top of this, these sites are all starting to offer online slots and table games so I question how much of a priority growing poker is to them.

Doesn´t fish love PLO? High variance games like PLO are good for the fish, are good for the sites (we know why), and it is still possible to have an edge and win. Maybe forcing an unsolved format (is this the case for PLO5?), or changing key rules etc, who knows). The sites insisting in keeping NLH going, instead of unilaterally killing it and forcing the regs to either play PLO or anygame else, or just GTFO, might also be the problem.

Unless there is a contradiction in what the sites say/used to say about the ecosystem, the insistence on keeping things unchanged to me is an indicative they really need regs, as much or even more than the recreationals. Bc it is the regs who are the most resistant to change, recs want to have fun.

People were not flush with cash in 2003 when Moneymaker won. The NASDAQ had just finished imploding 80% over an almost 3 year period and people's investments were vaporized.

It will be Artificial Intelligence

No imo with the rise of segregated markets its a slow death over the next 10 years

I mean, people always have money. 2003-8 were all great years. I was making crazy money

In 'the wealth of chips' the observation is the relationship between the quality of money of the time and the psychology of the gambler in each of us. Would it be more or less likely or more or less wise for a population to gamble their savings versus whatever the alternatives might be?

consider being a Brazilian or from argentine and having the option to hold your savings on a poker site and/or perhaps win in USD. If we want to calculate equillbrium we must consider the crossover.