less mouthdroolers = dry games or at least dry cards ldo

Poker was a big fad in 2004-2006 and brought a lot of people to the internet to play it. There were bonuses galore and the 50NL and 2/4 limit games were beatable by anyone who put any thought into it. Those days are over, thanks to the fickleness of the public, the UIGEA and probably the recession, but since online poker has been brought into the mainstream, there is still a ready supply of new players, most of whom suck. There are a lot of resources to help them get better, but most players won't avail themselves of them, so the players who do will have a distinct edge in the lowest stakes. The game is a lot tougher at the stakes where the regs start to be an appreciable size of the population.

If this were true the games would already be dead. Are you trolling or something?

I'm only playing 50nl but I can find ridiculously good games on any site at this level.

It's an educated guess,

and I believe I am more educated about this matter than you are. I think this because I am fairly knowledgeable about this, being politically/economically aware, being Chinese, and having spoken to people who would be even more knowledgeable about this, and yet you disagree what seems to be a likely opinion. Do you have any arguments for your side?

How much do you know about Chinese culture?

There has been a lot of effort in Hong Kong, for instance, to encourage poker, and in fact there has been a few more card-rooms, and even a movie, but nonetheless it is almost completely out of the mainstream, and poker is played by regs, bad as they are. There is no rapid explosion of interest. The Chris Moneymaker effect happened in a culture where everyone knows what poker is and probably has played some before. Here a movie does nothing, because the audience doesn't even know what it is before watching the movie. They probably think it's something like blackjack or baccarat.

Any interest in poker in China will come from outside influences slowly. People will slowly play more until they reach an equilibrium and it becomes a rare hobby that some people play and probably don't talk to other people about much because most people will have no idea about it, much less than in a country like America.

So tell me, how much do you know about China, and why do you think there will be an "explosion"?

Do you have reading problems? I am good enough at headsup to never have to change games, and I feel very safe, but that doesn't mean it's not getting harder or I win less than I would have before when the competition is softer.

What the f ck does this have to do with omaha or other games? Are you trying to say I can't play other games? That's a complete non-sequitor, unless you're trying to say that I don't know anything about poker beyond the mainstream game.

Really, why is that not drying up? What if it is less profitable? Doesn't it mean it IS drying up? That's like you're trying to get water from a river, and now there's less and less, and you have to walk all the way down stream to get it, and you're arguing that since you CAN get water if you walk all the way down stream, it's not actually drying up.

Logic moar?

Now if the action in Omaha is same as the action of NLHE before, sure, it's merely flowed over, but that's not the case. There is a bit more Omaha action, but the decrease in NLHE HU action is significantly more than the increase.

When a game dries up it means that everyone is really good at the game so it's impossible to win monies anymore. Ultimately, AI will be better at poker than humans and they will cause the games to dry up.

I'm not sure about that. I think regular to deep stack NLHE is too dynamic to be solved and beaten by any AI. If it is possible, I don't think it's happening anytime soon... IMO not within the next 5 years.

People getting better at poker isn't going to dry up poker, many people get beat and get beat bad as it is now and tey keep coming back. The problem is that if you think that winning players will outnumber losers your wrong. I don't know exact numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if under 10% of players are actual winners at online poker

Most new players don't find 2p2 or even know about it. They watch espn and say I can do this and jump online, they don't understand odds, outs, any math, etc. This will continue to be the trend as long as poker is out in the open and being advretised like it is.

Did anyone notice how many times during the wsop broadcast they stated darvin moon's never been to a casino? When in fact he won his seat in a sattelite at wheeling island and has been known to frequent there playing tourneys, 5/10, and 1/2 with his family

Coincidence? I think not, they want people to think you can go from playing at home with your buddies to being the wsop runner up. They are trying to bring the money to the games just as much as they are trying to just air poker for people to watch.

Poker won't dry up, if anything happens it will be that nlhe becomes a game of the past a plo takes over the mainstream following that nlhe now has

People are just predicting a continuation of the trend. Games have been getting progressively harder so people are predicting this will continue to the point where its too hard to make money.

I doubt anyone can do much more than speculate about what will truly happen.

Games will never "dry up" there will always be bad players and gamblers on every site, the average player might be better now then in the past and it will probably continue that way but as that happens your game should progress as well. Adapting the each table, situation is a key in poker.

The games will always be readily available for the profitable players imo

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Games will never "dry up" once the economy rebounds from the recession, and the US legalizes online poker.... theres a good chance that we will get a second poker boom. If this happens all the fish and casual players that thought it was illegal before will comeback.

Another reason why games wont dry up is because there always and forever will be the degens who just want to gamble. Poker has been around forever and will continue to be.

NO DO NOT DO THIS!! STAY AWAY FROM OMAHA, it is mine and mine alone with all the fish!! When you can sit at a table and get all other 5 people to go all in on the flop with draws or non-nut hands when you flop the absolute nuts (Quad Aces) possible on the table and collected about 550ish big blinds in one hand that's a very good sign of how poorly Omaha is played currently...

Fortunately this isn't an isolated event...so many people playing Omaha that don't even know you have to use 2 from your hand and 3 from the board. I am in love with Omaha and overall suck at it....it just isn't hard to learn and keep ahead of the curve when everyone else is playing NLHE with just more cards in their hand.

It will get tougher to win money, and many players who had historically been winners during the fat years will become losers in the lean times....

...until the next boom.

It's happened after every poker boom that I've looked at or experienced (e.g. hold'em legalized in California in '87; opening of Foxwoods; legal poker in Atlantic City; the Rounders boom; the online poker boom; the TV poker boom....

Note that, although the games get tougher again, they don't get as tough as they had been during the dry spell preceding the most recent boom.

Do you think you might be personalizing this a *little* too much? Poker has changed in the past, it's changing in the present, it will change in the future. New players enter the game, some players leave the game, and the games they play change. But there are soft games all over the place.

If one game gets tougher, there are other games that are softer. I have nothing to say regarding whether YOU can hack it, but if you want a softer game, look around for it.

And if the game as a whole gets marginally tougher, that would not prompt me to say "the game is drying up" any more than a light drizzle would prompt me to say "the sky is falling."

Meanwhile, it's currently after 1:00 in the morning in parts of the U.S., on a weekday night, and there are over 100,000 players playing at just ONE POKER SITE. No such phenomenon was even imaginable a decade ago. If it momentarily got a bit softer, and then toughened up a bit again, so what? those 100,000 players are not all world class, they're mostly highly exploitable.

Even if 80% of all the current poker players in the world stopped playing *tomorrow*, en masse, and never played again, the poker world would still be a paradise for the expert players, and the opportunity would be great relative to what it had been once upon a time.

"I'm annoyed to see some opponents playing better slightly better than blind monkeys" should not become a prediction of doom for the future of poker.

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Also, the saying "there's a sucker born every minute" is quite apt. There will be a new crop soon to replace whoever drops out.

One more thing. As was suggested earlier in this thread, all the information and resources in the world are not sufficient to wise most people up to the game. I've seen *so much* evidence recently, just on 2+2, that people can buy the best books, read them, study them, have them explained to them in explicit detail by highly experienced experts, and still not get the concepts *at all*. They knowingly dismiss the greatest works written on the subject, they praise the crap, they continue to wonder when they should fold AA preflop in cash games, and they think the golden key to riches is to play break even poker on 27 tables simultaneously. And these are the GOOD ones.

So, uh... when should I fold AA preflop in cash games?


Also, what (nl) books do you consider good that others dismiss and vice versa?

I am not saying you will not be able to find a profitable game in the future. Games will just be more difficult overall. This does not mean you will lose money. Also, at micro stakes, games should always be pretty good, so I def would not worry if I played micro stakes.

....

I'm making this my motto

So... the new posting style is quoting oneself? Guess I gotta get down with the program:

Oh, and, I'll break the rules a little and actually add new content to my post. If I had a million bucks, and I lost a thousand, I wouldn't say "I'm running out of money," or "my funds are drying up." Obviously "drying up" implies SERIOUS trouble, as in pending cataclysm. If the Amazon river goes down half a centimeter during dry season, I wouldn't proclaim the river is "drying up" either.

You shouldn't. And that's the point.

Considering *only* no-limit hold'em, I've seen some very ignorant and dismissive comments about the Harrington series. I haven't read any crappy no-limit hold'em books that are getting praised, mainly because I haven't read many no-limit hold'em books.

As I have said, if the reg:fish ration of NLHE is increase, and the same ratio of PLO is decreasing at the same rate, then what you say is true, but there are far more regs at NLHE now than there are fish at PLO.

There is no doubt there is some increase on PLO interest, but it is no way enough to justify the decrease in action in NLHE or at least the reg:fish ratio at NLHE HU, so what you say here is mostly irrelevant.

Analogy: UB/AP stole a lot of money from players. Now then pay back 1/10th of the money that was stolen from players, and now you argue since they paid money back, it's now even again, and UB/AP (or people related to them) didn't actually steal any money.

Obviously BS.

The bottom line, the increase in toughness of NLHE is far more significant than the increase in softness/action of the other games (PLO/Mixed games). Can you please use some data to counter this? The increase in action of the mixed games at mid-high stakes have been dubious in comparison to the rows of regs sitting at HUNL waiting for fish. There are barely ever more than 4 tables of 10/20 Razz or Stud8 running these days, and rarely more than 6 Stud ones, and fairly often there is only 1 with 3 tables on it, and the good players have to play on both sites at the same time. How is this enough to make up for the loss of action at NLHE??

It is very mediocre. Who are you to say that I am ignorant? Back up the points. I've explained on many occasions in depth why it's bad, with examples and references and everything. What have you done to prove that my dismissals are ignorant?

Why do you think that I am more ignorant than you? Do you think you know poker more than I do? HU4Rollz?

It was Never Win who quoted me, not myself. Please be more careful when reading/slandering.

Now on to the point... the change is not "a drizzle". Do you even play enough NLHE to know the significance of change? There are at times more than 40-60 tables at one stake of HU on stars where 1 reg is sitting on a table waiting for action. 60 tables waiting for fish, and only 6 tables actually running. Do you get how ridiculous that is? Even on FTP where sitting multiple tables is not allowed, there are upwards of 15-25 at times.

The action at HUSnGs has also increased in the past years, even though my personal results have increased. Why is this? Because I am not one of those braindead grinders you talk about, but that doesn't mean the game has not gotten tougher. If the game had remained the same, I am fairly confident I'd be making a LOT faster progress than I am now.

In the end it's irrelevant whether it's getting tougher, since it will always be easy enough for me to keep playing, but that doesn't mean it's "not drying up".

Oh, also, when I say drying up, I don't mean there is no water left, but drying up means some water has evaporated, not nec. meaning they are ALL gone, so in case you think I am worried that all the money will be gone, I, as I had made clear in my very first post, do not think so, but it is def getting worse.

Before you can wait for 5 minutes and get action at, say, 50NL HU, which is the micro stakes. Let's talk about micron stakes, that's fair right?

Nowadays, I can wait for 15 minutes at FIFTY NL and still not get action. FIFTEEN MINUTES. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? 300% increase in wait time is definitely significant enough to be notable.

You say that it is not significant or important... how much data/experience on the situation do you have to be saying this, or are you just saying this because you think or feel that way? Who are you to have the authority/experience on this matter, or are you simply talking about stuff you have no clue about?

I am thinking it's the latter. This is not an ad homien, because in this case, it is highly relevant. I have told you my own knowledge/experience on the matter and why I am a qualified judge, now it's your turn.

I shall quote myself one time:

The first underline indicates that it is getting tougher. It's fairly significant a difference that you have to play against winning players, and when you simply have to play against fish. Is it difficult to win against "winning" players? Not that much for me, at my stakes, but that's going to suddenly make a LOT of previously "winning" players into losing ones, and the higher the stakes, the more difficult it is. If everyone is forced to play winning players, then about half of the winning players would suddenly become losing players (not exactly due to bumhuntiung, etc, obv). Half the population changing from winning to losing is fairly significant.

Obv not all the losing players are gone, or even close, but at the higher stakes, there are very rarely any clueless fish, and most of the players losing are good players trying to take shots who get gobbled up by bigger sharks. In the HUSnG thread, a longtime high stakes players is leaving poker and planning to release a guide/manual on 15-30 bb stack play, and asked other regs if it'd be okay, and a huge majority of regs said no, that would be ridiculous and make poker unbeatable, while the lower stakes players obviously wanted a share, and and in the end it was not released/written because the consensus was that at the higher stakes, the majority of losers are in fact winning players from the mid stakes who actually do read 2+2 or are "regs", and not fish.

So we ARE in a situation where regs are being preyed on extensively. That's VERY different from what we're used to from before where the majority of players you play are losing. At the micros or 6max/FR, the majority of players are still donks/fish/casual players, but we're seeing HU being eroded, and more than 80% of villains, a high stakes reg estimates, that he plays against, are now weaker regs.

Do you see ANY problem in this? No? You don't see a significant difference between playing casual players who don't understand poker theory or study the game, and playing agianst people who are constantly trying to improve their game?

You realize there is a diminishing return on improvement right? A new player will decrease his disadvantage faster than a better player will increase his edge because at a certain point, the advantages or improvements you can make are going to be far smaller.

Attempt number two after server error killed my first reply. Rats!:

I was mistaken about who quoted whom. No slander involved. But sorry for the mixup.

Why should I play a lot of NLHE to know whether poker is drying up? You're again defining "poker" as your pet game. But I do know, as pointed out before, that there are hundreds of thousands of poker players online day and night, all week long, playing in a ton of soft games.

As for heads up NLHE, I don't know for sure, but it's certainly possible that this is a game in which experts routinely demolish novices. Games like that, unfortunately, do not tend to have much of a half-life, even if they experience a sudden surge in popularity. But if the weaker players are sitting down elsewhere in the poker room, you follow them, or you bash heads with the more competent players who stick around for a while longer.

Semantics. If you want to define a slight reduction in action as "drying up," then who's to tell you that there hasn't been a slight reduction? If your end of the pond is getting hit worse than some other areas, who's to tell you that you shouldn't claim the pond is "drying up." But you should recognize that the majority of people hearing this claim, including the OP and most who have responded, hear "drying up" as a sensationalist claim on par with "poker is dying." Hey look, I'm dying too. I got a day older since yesterday.

So here, I've tried to understand you. I recognize the legitimacy of your claim that the poker you play has got less action today than it did four years ago, even if it's MUCH more than it was ten years ago. So try to understand me when I say that I don't forecast the doom of poker in the future, and don't encourage anyone else to do so either.

Regarding the rest, you continue to make this a personal matter, and you seem to require credentials. I've played poker for many years, and I even occassionally play some NLHE on a lark. Meanwhile, I have enough sense to look around and see that the massive number of players on a massive number of tables, online and in casinos, represent an abundant opportunity for profit. And I recognize that there is still a steady flow of new players into the game, most of whom are not learning the game very well, despite the resources available to them.

My experience is sufficient to see further back into the past, and further into the future, than just a few years. I'm not claiming to KNOW the future, but I also know not to see a downturn in action today as a sign of... well, much at all!

And yes, you've taken this too personal, and you really get hot under the collar when someone recommends you play in a soft PLO game. Some people would actually appreciate the tip that there's lots of money to be made, but others take it as a personal affront it seems. And I NEVER questioned your personal ability to play in ANY particular game of poker. It's true that, if there is a contraction in the poker economy, it will hit the marginal players and the best will have to adapt, but I haven't labled YOU as someone in danger of getting busted out. So DON'T spin it that way. I wouldn't question why you are entitled to an opinion either. Anyway, take it as you like it.

I do not forecast the doom of the game. Also it's true that there are a lot more new players these days than before, thanks to PokerStars, but the reg:fish ratio is dropping, and the average level of the regular is also increasing.

Enough to make me fear my future as a profitable player? No.

But it does suck, that's all I am saying. Trying to find more profitable games is fine, but any game will eventually die off, maybe not as quickly as HU, but really there is no running. A few years ago, we were in the peak of the fish:reg situation, and most regs were not that strong, we've reached a situation where most regs will be strong, and can only be combatted by having more fish, which is currently true, but if not as many new fish are joining the game, then the situation will decline, until lots of regs stop playing, and we reach an equilibrium of sorts, but my forecast is that this equilibrium will be less profitable than what we had a few years ago, or even just half a year ago.

This difference is enough to make some weaker 2+2 players into losers or from winning players into barely breaking even. So yes, you are right that THE WORLD IS NOT ENDING, if you saw my last post, I quoted myself saying as much: the world is not ending. The games will be NOTICEABLY different, however, and can do as much as halve someone's expected hourly, depending on what games you play (especially high stakes). That, sir, is significant. Sure, if you play the really soft games or really low volume ones, your hourly won't change, but this is because those games are not good for hourly and as such you don't get as much competition from other grinders.

Finally, all this "PLO GAMES ARE SOFT, IT'S THE NEW BIG THING" cry, which I've heard many times, I do not buy it. It is my own opinion, and some people share it, while some people I respected have said it's soft also. Whatever I do not think it will feasibly take over NLHE as the most attractive game to fish.

Yes, I do think NLHE is the most profitable game. Even though mixed games are far softer in terms of reg competition (easier to become a winning player), the volume of it and willingness of many players to deposit to play it, makes NLHE an easy choice for a person trying to make money. Mixed game players will face lots of regs who are poor, but will not lose a lot. NLHE, you can find regs that WILL lose a lot, because they can win it back from other fish, you're actually on top of a small food chain. Mixed games do not offer the same game selection usually, so players are either winning players or losing players, or break even players, imo, but it's a small factor. Basically you're generally waiting for a fish to show up, then you sit.

I took it personally when you gave me patronizing advice. It's not necessary of me, but you do not have to take heed to this either, so whatever.

Oh, and HoC is still a terrible series.

Well first of all you have the UIGEA which cut off the US facing sites' supply of fish.

Also Stars and Full Tilt set their RB equivalent and tables up in such a way as to encourage mass multi-tabling by regs. No doubt this maximises their rake/player/day of whatever and it was what the reg community was crying out for so they got it.

5 years ago it was 4 tables max you could play. Now in cash games its 24 on Stars and 16 on FT and they also provide timebanks to let people do this.

HUDs like PT3 and HEM available and are also legal to use on those sites which makes keeping track of individual players across a large number of tables simultaneously possible.

So it's not much of a surprise that games have toughened up vastly on Stars and FT.

That's dealt with:
UIGEA
HUD's
Mass Multi-tabling

However I think the effect of training sites and books etc may be being a bit overrated. It's not that I don't think the theory and understanding of poker haven't improved, it's just that I'm not sure what % of the players sitting at the tables have made the effort to really use them properly to improve their play.

I play on iPoker. There are no timebanks so you are lucky if you can play more than 8 tables of six max. 12 is the cap. There has been no UIGEA over here and poker is still growing. When I sit down at the SSNL tables (at ipoker these are mostly euro and £ tables rather than $ ones so they are on average equivalent to say $140 and $280 ones) about one-third to one-half of them have an average of players seeing the flop of more than 30% and almost every table will have at least one full stacker with more than 40% Vp$iP. These are often French it seems

Ask any of the players on the Euro sites - the games are fine - the donks are still here (and so is the 60% RB at least for the moment)

If games are getting much tougher at Stars/FT that sounds like it's mainly caused by local issues at those sites/the USA, and not some approaching tipping point worldwide where everyone is so competent that the rake always wins...