Pretty much ^ this ^.

The "dream" was always going to be short-lived anyway.

It was nothing more than a pyramid scheme in reality. Pyramid schemes look attractive when people are making lots of money. However, like all pyramid schemes, once the money going in at the bottom starts drying up it is basically game over. Government interference, greedy sites and predatory players only hastened the inevitable decline.

Easy money schemes usually have a short life-span. Online poker is no exception. The only surprising thing is that people are surprised that it happened.

We just need to get China and India fully online and then the dream is alive boys.

People turned legal gambling age every day and gambling hasn’t gone away in many many generations. If the government hadn’t gotten involved I think the “dream” would have been around for a long long time.

I somewhat agree, but the big difference is that people nowadays lose their money faster due to people being so much better.

I actually remember running up a bankroll about 10-12 years ago from $0 to $200 a few times with absolutely zero poker knowledge, I don't think that is really possible today or at least it's much harder.

I mean low stakes MTTs are still really bad, but I don't know if people really have the patience for them, cash is completely out of the question, I don't think a poker noobie who is naturally smart and just picks things up quick would be able to beat 25NL, so it makes getting into it a bit more difficult.

The only thing to mitigate this would be a MASSIVE player injection, say America, India and China coming online around the same time. If that happened and the poker industry as a whole decided to take things seriously again, maybe you can get back to a boom.

Unfortunately I do not have the statistic, but I think the poker industry last year saw it's first positive year where it gained more money than it lost, so maybe with YT/twitch and 2nd/third world countries coming fully online, things might not be so bad.

There are far more things than government interference that led to the decline of the "dream". To name just a few:

Software, data-mining, training sites, bots, predatory behavior, boring games infested with multi-tabling grinders. Need I go on?

India and China coming online isn't going to fix those problems.

Dont think it will ever be dead...Harder and thougher probably, but a dream never dies =) You just age..

The dream can be whatever you want it to be I guess. My dream was to play poker recreationally and profitably as a hobby. I have been doing that since 2012 which was when I last deposited on a poker site.

And while it's still fun I'll keep doing it. As soon as it stops being fun or becomes unprofitable I will find something else to do.

The way that I look at poker is much different than the view that many of you have. Here is my perspective:

After frequenting these forums for about a year, I realized that if I ever made poker my full-time job, it would be a lot of nights and weekends. I also knew that if I ever did it full-time it would be irregular income--especially for me, because I only play one thing--NLHE MTTs.

I have a history of a lot of jobs, good and bad. In the 1980s my city was tied with Flint, MI for the highest unemployment in the United States, at 21%. I took any job I could get wherever I had to go to get it.

I had some great jobs, like being an academic proofreader of books published by the Harvard and University of Michigan presses, and I played in an army band. I also had a job running a press where every time it slammed down it squirted oil all over me. I was a day laborer for a temp agency. I worked as many hours as I could, whenever and wherever I was working. There were some 60 hour weeks and some weeks where I worked all three shifts in the same week.

In a way poker is like that because I can't control it, it controls me. I can't change variance. There are only two things I can control, whether I'm doing my best, and whether I'm using good bankroll management--I never play with less than 100 buy-ins at that level.

My life is ruled by tournament starting times, structures and prize pools. The anchor tournaments that bracket most of my work days start at 1014 and 2214, with a nap in there somewhere if I can get to sleep. If a tournament disappears or a starting time is changed, that can mess with my entire schedule. All of this leads to some very interesting conversations with my wife when we're trying to plan something.

The thing is, I didn't like a lot of my 1980s and 90s jobs. I love poker. Of the 20 or so different job types that I've had I would put the army band first, poker second and academic proofreading third. I came to poker used to weird hours and long hours. In fact, one of the things that I like about poker is that I have the freedom to work more than 40 hours a week, playing or studying, if I want to.

When I had a boss telling me when to work, I couldn't ask to work another 10 hours that week to make more money. Also, my wife and I both work at home and she works 40 hours a week. I wouldn't feel right about doing any less, in fact, I track my time by quarter hours with the emphasis on at least 10 hours of study every week. I played about 450 MTTs in 2017 and it will be more than 600 this year. Yes, it's a grind. I joked once that an exciting day for me is taking the car to the mechanic and stopping to eat at McDonalds on the way home. There was a lot of truth to that. I don't get out much.

I'm 62 years old and I hope to be playing a lot of poker for at least the next 10 years. I understand variance. I had three net loss months in 2017 and I still made a profit. Nothing about poker scares me. I don't ever again want to have a job where I have a boss. Retirement is a dirty word to me.

where do you play? online? which sites.

Last year I played a little on Americas Cardroom, but mostly on Juicy Stakes poker. I wanted to have money on at least two sites to increase my options of where and when I can play.

When I switched to grinding only online tournaments in 2017 I had $40 that had been sitting on Juicy Stakes Poker for two years. After a few months I decided to concentrate on building up my JSP bankroll. I got it up to over $500 playing mostly $1 tournaments.

As I want to have multiple options, I will go back to playing some live tournaments later this year. I'm going to treat live poker just like I treated the $40 on Juicy Stakes, taking a little bit of money (I'll start with $30 live MTTs) and grinding up a bankroll the same way I did with Juicy Stakes Poker. In 2016 I decided that starting pm 1/1/2017 I was going to spend a couple years doing nothing but grinding up bankrolls.

I don't think much about how much money I'll make in a month or even in a year I'm taking the long view and, with a minimal investment, setting myself up to be making serious money five years from now.

In regards to Doug Polk's BR challenge.

I think he handicapped himself by playing the micros too similarly to the higher stakes strategy. The rake affects the playablity of a ton of hands especially in the big blind, and it also affects post flop bets. Hands that were 3% edge at high stakes becomes a -2% loser at micros

In general I agree with you, because in general to succeed in just about anything you have to, as they say in amateur wrestling, embrace the grind.

I was in an army band. We had a trombone player who, before every rehearsal, warmed up by playing scales. He told me that by doing that every day, by the end of the week every scale had been practiced. By "every" scale, he meant in every key: major, minor, chromatic, modal, and maybe others as well. Yo-Yo Ma* (18 Grammy Awards and an apprearance on The Simpsons) has been overheard practicing scales in his hotel room for six straight hours.

Very few actors make the big money and it doesn't happen overnight. Many Los Angeles-based actors are really waiters or in retail, and spend their free time going to auditions. In fact, they climb a ladder just like poker players moving up levels, starting with high school acting, then drama school and the auditions--you get the idea.

If you want to get really good at anything you better put the time in. I devote 40 hours a week to poker (studying and playing). Since my wife works 40 hours it doesn't seem right that I would be willing to do less, in fact, one of the things that I love about poker is that I don't have to ask a boss if I can work overtime. I can work more hours if I want to make more money. Forty hours a week is the minimum.

One more thing. Where you live does make a big difference on how much money you need to make, but it's not just about what country you're in. Even in the US it depends a lot where you live and on your situation.

I'm a US player. For many years I lived in a neighborhood in the state of Michigan where making 50K a year was big money and you could buy a decent house for 30K. Now my wife and I live in a paid-for mobile home that she inherited. It's big enough for my wife and I to each have an office.

We live about 5 miles from a state park on Lake Michigan. The lot rent is $400 a month and the "mobile home community" (that's what it says on the sign) covers the water bill. I am a retired veteran, which means that my wife and I can fly free (when space is available) on any military flight in the United States. Clearly I don't have to be in the Global Poker Index top 100 to have a comfortable life.

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*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-Yo_Ma

That’s true, people define “comfortable life” in their own, very different ways.

You could also live in the Montana woods, ride 20 miles to the nearest city in the morning and play online poker from a park bench using a MetroPCS hotspot from your phone and spend less on monthly expenses than others on health insurance alone.

We live in a “hip” part of a large metro in the Midwest where the average yearly rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is in the same ballpark as buying a house in the neighborhoods 2 miles to the East. “Perks” of living in a racially divided city.

Besides that, when it comes to that topic, the US is one country on paper only. The difference between living in NYC or Chicago or a large European city like London or Berlin (where I lived for a couple of years) is way smaller than the difference between NYC and the South of the US or a small Midwest town.

The economical differences between the East/West coast in the US and everything in between are already increasing on a rapid pace but that will accelerate even more when California increases their minimum wage to $15 and other states will follow. That’s only going to increase “brain drain” which already is a huge problem in the South and Midwest.

I see nothing wrong with this. At one time (before I was playing poker full-time) I worked all kinds of weird hours. I've worked all of the shifts, and in one job, all three shifts in the same week. It was a small business with only a few employees, so if even one person was missing there was overtime available. I snapped up every hour that I could get.

Doing this did not in any way destroy my lifestyle. When my wife and I adopted a sibling group (3 boys ages 6, 8 and 9) she kept her first shift job and I worked mostly second or third so that someone was always home. There are a lot of jobs where people work long hours, or weird hours, or are on call. Why should poker be any different?

One other comment about lifestyle issues. There are plenty of places in the United States where you don't have to make piles of money to be comfortable, especially if you are good at money management with poker and with the rest of your life.

My wife and I live in a home that is paid for. It's a double-wide trailer, which is fine because two people really don't need a big house. My wife has been making contributions to her 401k and other investment plans for about 45 years. I get both state and federal military retirement payments. I am retired veteran, which means that my wife and I can fly free, when space is available, on any military flight in the United States.

Because we had good money management outside of poker, I don't need to make six figures playing poker next year. In these forums we sometimes talk like $50K is chump change. There are places in the US where 75K will buy a nice 3-bedroom hours. In our situation if I make 25K playing poker next year my wife will be very happy.

I actually ended up moving to Eastern Europe to chase the poker dream after I made a decent chunk from poker, so in some ways it's not dead at all, but I'm also from here originally so there is no language or culture barrier.

you gotta love the grind more than the results otherwise you will just quit like 99% of people do in all endeavors who fail in getting results.

Sick thread, going to bump it. Alot changed in a year?

No, poker is a little bit deader but otherwise no change.

It's in stage 3. No one with enough talent to succeed outside of poker should pick up poker as their primary source of income.