Does poker have a future?

The Game Room
1

Between 10-15 years ago the game of poker, specifically Texas Hold 'Em, exploded in popularity, for a variety of reasons; the movie “Rounders,” the sudden availability of online poker, and the 2003 World Series of Poker in which a nobody amateur player, the wonderfully named Chris Moneymaker, won the entire shebang after winning his seat in an online tournament.

Poker became a popular TV show. Books flew off the shelves. US players were sadly kicked off the Internet in 2006, but they kept flooding into regular cardrooms.

In the last few years the popularity of poker has, to say the least, been waning. Online poker is declining rapidly; estimates of up to a 15-17% year over year dropoff can be found with the quickest of Google searches. Poker rooms are closing in many places or being cut back.

  1. Why is this happening? WAs this simply a fad, or is poker failing its market? What are casinos and online services doing wrong? What forces are at work here?
  2. Is this decline reversible?
  3. If so, how?
2

Why is it happening? Because poker is only fun when you are winning, and unfortunately everybody went and got themselves educated, and now online players are just passing chips back and forth.

I always regret that I missed out on the big poker boom, I got into it at the tail end and while I still made a nice sum of money I suspect I could really have cleaned up in earlier years. But even before I quit I could see play everywhere getting tighter and tighter, instead of random people chasing flushes you now had nits playing ten tables and waiting for monster hands.

Personally, I think the worst thing to happen poker was the tracking software that everybody started downloading. Now they had displays on their screens showing exactly what hands cost them the most money and what the percentages were at any given time. The more people had that information the more the game became a TAG nightmare.

The poker sites didn’t help themselves either. They were quite happy to allow shortstackers and bots on multi tables, but in the long run those players drove the casuals away and the game needed the casuals to survive. And now its probably too late.

3

The high/no-limit money eventually transferred from the noobs to the pros. The low-limit players eventually came to the conclusion that they could make the same hourly rate working at McDonalds with less financial risk.

4

Just to clarify, my post was aimed at online poker. Obviously there are different issues for live poker.

5

Working at McDs is probably more fun and exciting than playing online poker. By God it’s boring.
Money’s not boring, nor is the challenge of getting skilled at something. But the fundamental game, if you can call it that, that underpins those two things is crushingly tedious. That has to be part of why poker is struggling.

6

Nate Silver talks about this in his book “The Signal and the Noise”. His basic thesis was that originally there was a very steep skill curve, such that you could be better than about 80% of players just with basic skills (I.e. being able to calculate odds and to guage opponents hands). There were still people out there who could beat you, but if you put any thought into your play then you could be pretty sure that you weren’t the sucker at the table. More importantly, there were enough really poor players to ensure that you didn’t even have to be the best player at the table to come out ahead. So mildly-skilled Nate took money from those with no skill, and all was well.

But that changed. People cottoned on to the fact that they weren’t very good, and either quit or got better. (Or they just went broke). That meant that Nate, with his reasonable level of skill, now *was *the sucker. And he would have had to improve a lot in terms of absolute skill in order to make even a small improvement in his relative standing against the remaining players. Variance became a much bigger factor. So he wasn’t about to stop being the sucker any time soon.

So he quit. His story stops there, but one imagines that the players who were taking money from Nate’s skill-cohort now found themselves at the bottom of the pile and adjusted accordingly. And so on…

7

The dropoff started when the law in the USA was changed to make it illegal for credit card companies to process charges to online casinos. There was now no easy way to collect any money you won.

It was right about that time when ESPN started mandating a “you can’t wear anything that advertises a .com ‘real money’ online poker site; if you do, you will be removed from your table (and forfeit any blinds when it is your turn to pay them) until you remove it” (although .net “learning” sites, which just happened to have the same names as the pay sites, were OK - in fact, I think PokerStars.net was a sponsor). Quite a few players were seen with tape over their hats and their T-shirts turned inside-out until the companies showed up with .net clothing.

8

I was one of the fortunate ones during the poker explosion. I was a professional poker player in Las Vegas, grinding out a decent but not fabulous living in live games when the first online poker room opened. I was also a computer geek – ignoring the advice of the live game players who almost all said “You’ll lose all your money.”, I gave online poker a try. I lost my first buy-in quickly, spent some time examining the very useful computer log of every hand I had played, found the flaws in the opponents game, and proceeded to earn my living at online poker for the next 10 years, earning a far higher hourly rate than I ever had in live play.

The first problem that showed up in online poker – rake back programs, the Affiliate programs, and the Google page rank system. Live poker rooms need that $2 to $3 per pot rake to pay their expenses but it is outrageously high for online games which do not have the expenses of live card rooms.

Live games run around 30 hands per hour, online games double or triple that … so the online rooms offered to refund part of the rake to players … and to find new players, they set-up affiliate programs, offering to pay part of the rake each new player an affiliate brought to the site to the affiliate who would then offer to give some of that money back to player who had signed up through the affiliate’s website – and the Google page rank system made it so that searching for online poker ensured that the searcher was taken to an affiliate website rather than to an actual online poker website, even if he had specified a certain poker site in his search. So a big part of the money in the poker economy, rather than being put back into play on the tables was being taken out of circulation by the affiliates who were signing up tens of thousands of players.

Then came the TV explosion. But watching people play limit poker is boring. To insure plenty of drama, the TV shows featured short-handed no-limit play. No-limit had been a dead game for many years for many reasons; the one I’ll touch on here is that fact that it is unsustainable without a regular influx of new players because the noobs go broke so quickly and end up feeling they have been cheated. The dramatic all-ins in short-handed games on TV drew a lot of new players to the action, but those players wanted to play the same kind of game they had seen on TV – the dead game of No Limit Hold 'em.

This brought about the extremely low stakes games, literally playing for pennies … which lead to people playing dozens of games at a time … which means they only play the absolute best hands and fold the rest … which makes the game very bad. While the TV shows (actually pretty much infomercials for online poker sites) were running they kept drawing new players in to the games and the bad games on the internet led many of them to try their hand at live poker and the games exploded. The problem was that the explosion was in the previously dead and unsustainable game of No Limit Hold 'em.

New players mostly very quickly lost all their money, often with the gut wrenching feeling that they had been cheated. A few studied the game a bit and became skilled enough to beat the absolute noobs and learned to just stay out of pots with the actual good players. The TV shows drew in a steady stream of new players.

And then the government stepped in, online poker basically ended, the TV shows ended, the regular large influx of new players ended, the lesser skilled players in the live poker rooms lost their money to the better players, and the rooms that for a while had had a two hour waiting list for a seat at one of dozens of tables now had only a few tables open with an unhappy group of local pros waiting for a pigeon to perch on the open seat.

To sum up: The poker explosion has gone bust because the game that exploded was No Limit Hold 'em, a game that is unsustainable. Limit games will survive because the skill to luck factor makes it possible for a new player to sometimes have a winning session and even when they lose, they don’t lose in the gut wrenching dramatic all-in … they have some time to have some fun for their money.

9

It is interesting to note two things about Turble’s post:

  1. I had not thought about the limit/no limit difference. The local limit-only cardroom, Brantford, is actually doing as well as ever. On weekends and tournament days the place is a zoo. They do as well or better than the Niagara casinos, which, logically, should not happen if poker is just poker. And indeed, the game is more inviting to the novice player, who can sit at a 2/5 limit table and spend hours blowing off a hundred bucks and maybe even make money because they hit a flush draw.

The future my lie in a resurgence of limit poker.

  1. Online poker has not basically ended. It ended FOR AMERICANS, but remained immensely popular outside the USA. However, it’s now dropping. Pokerstars and all its competitors saw a 17% drop year over year from 2014 to 2015 - which has nothing to do with the U.S. ban on online poker.
10

I’ve played poker as a full time income on and off over the last 12 years. Mostly online for the first 2-3, mostly live for the last decade.

The low barriers to entry and advertising money of online poker drew an influx of players. Losing the US market online put a downward trend on the entire world poker economy, both online and live.

The poker boom was more about the advent of online poker rather than any ESPN coverage or anything like that. Poker coverage was all over TV*, not just ESPN, and sometimes it was even a time-buy (like an informertial pretending to be a real show in order to promote a certain site), and the advertising dollars behind online poker was a big driving force in getting it on tv, which in turn allowed it to become part of our culture.

Online poker also provided an easy, appealing way for new players to give it a try. Since there was no cost involved in starting an additional online poker table, you could play for any stakes - so you could learn to play for pennies from the comfort of your own home. It made it very easy for players to take a shot at it. In comparison, the minimum limits you can play live require a relatively significant amount of money to play. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily lose hundreds in a night playing live, trying to learn, whereas online you could make $100 last months if you were so inclined. But most people would move up in limits as they got more familiar with it.

So online poker brought in a whole lot of people, by flooding TV with it and making it a ubiqitous cultural icon, and by giving people a low-stakes low-pressure venue to give it a try. This brought in the new players and new money that fueled the poker boom.

Online gets banned in the US - and the US is the primary market in the world as well as something that sets the pace for cultural booms in large parts of the world. Boom, instantly the ads from online poker sites stop and the amount of poker on TV contracts hugely because it was mostly propped up by that ad revenue. The fad was already waning simply due to exhausting its popularity, but this quickly took it out of the public conciousness. New players who might’ve grown in confidence playing online now would stay away from the game entirely. The influx of new players and new money started to dry up.

Without those new players and that new money, a death spiral begins. The bottom tier of players get beat - either they go broke or they get better and are no longer on the bottom tier. Either way, that bottom tier dries up. Now the next tier up skill wise is the bottom tier. In turn, they go broke or get better. And so on. Until there’s a general upward pressure. Now players who were a few tiers ahead of bad players are now the new bottom tier. And so on. The average skill level goes up. New players to the games get destroyed because they can’t find a venue with players that are only slightly better than them - they face much tougher competition even at the lowest levels and get destroyed. Someone who might’ve kept playing if he hadn’t faced such adversity instead quits the game.

So the amount of money coming into the game dries up, the new players dry up, players are forced to get better, the total amount of players shrink, there’s a lower edge for the remaining players because the skill levels have been compressed and there are fewer exploitable players. Also, some former online players decide to go live and make the games much tougher. Online players are just flat out better than live players by a huge margin, even though everyone will tell you otherwise.

There’s not much future in it, at least nothing like the boom. There will be too many good players chasing fewer bad players. Not enough money or players going in. It won’t ever quite fade away, and it may not even fade to pre-boom levels, but it will steadily decline.

I disagree with Turble that limit might make a comeback. I understand his reasons, but no limit games are simply to ingrained in our culture at this point. Limit games are very rare and showing no increased trends in popularity. On an average night in Vegas, I would guess that there are only 3-4 games in town higher than 4-8 playing limit. It’s extremely niche. A few years back the Venetian tried to create a limit scene by spreading 8-16 and 15-30 games with a promo rake, and those were actually a lot of fun and I wish they stuck around, but they dried up when the promo did.

Anyway, as to why online poker is dying even outside the US market - short term greed over long term growth. The rakebacking HUD-bot 24 tabler people killed the game. They’re poison. They play a version of poker that isn’t fun for anyone, they not only slow down the game, but they slow down 24 games at once. That’s the thing - their influence is 24 times greater than a casual recreational player who plays 1 game at a time. They’re everywhere. Most of the tables are made up by these tight, boring, HUD-using players who are good enough to be hard to beat and not at all interesting to play against. But a table full of them will grind away at a recreational casual player who’s not having any fun. Sites could’ve prevented this by limiting the number of tables, or anonymizing hand histories to prevent HUDs and data mining, or other tactics that would’ve made the games much more sustainable long term, but these guys were paying absurd amounts of rake. They wanted to cash in, with no regard for sustainability.

Which is my other point - online rake is absolutely absurd. Live poker rakes $4-6 but they run a poker room, a floor staff, pay a dealer, pay for drinks and cooling and all of the stuff that actually costs money, as well as making a profit. Online poker operating costs were practically nothing, but they would still charge a $2-3 rake, even with the higher hands per hour, and multitabling already increasing the profitability per player in an absolute sense over live play. That rake is absolutely absurd. It greatly reduces the edges of winning players and makes losing players go broke faster. It fleeces everyone, making the whole situation unsustainable. I was never a serious multitabler (I usually played 2-4 tables), but I think I paid well over $100,000 in rake in my busiest online year. Yes, before I saw a cent of profit, I had to pay the poker site $100,000. I mean, compare that, to say, an MMO subscription, where they have to run much more sophisticated computer hardware, more taxing requirements, developing new content, etc. They charge you $12-15 a month to play. Somehow World of Warcraft could make a profit off my $150 a year subscription, but pokerstars wants $100,000+ out of me. The price gouging was ridiculous. It makes moderately winning players into break even players, small winners into losers, break even players into big losers, and losing players into huge losers. The rake is why only about 3-5% of poker players can actually win money at the game.

So the edges were small, because of the rake, and 20+ tablers with HUDs were everywhere and fleecing new players, and with the US market gone a huge chunk of the new players and new money were gone - it was such a hostile environment that all you had left were HUD-bots reaching a stalemate and getting raked away.

*Incidentally, I don’t know why people watched poker on TV. The popular poker shows were absolutely awful poker. They focused on the drama of the actual random outcome and dramatic card dealing of 50/50 situations in tournaments which were so short stacked that no real decision was involved. The way they chose their focus and how to edit them stripped almost everything interesting and poker-like out of the game, and there was nothing interesting for people who actually knew poker to watch. It made me wonder what the target audience was, then - people who have no idea what’s interesting about poker, yet still wanted to watch a poker show? There were some legit poker shows (High Stakes Poker being the best, other even less known ones) but they were very niche and unpopular compared to the awful ESPN and WPT coverage. Even Poker After Dark, which would have a really interesting cash game about once every 10 weeks, would show this utterly pointless, could-not-be-less-interesting shortstacked sit and go as their bread and butter.

11

I didn’t mean to imply that Limit will replace No Limit and poker will continue at boom levels. The boom is over. No Limit is a deeply flawed game and in my 20 years in Vegas before the first online games appeared the only times I ever saw NLHE games was during the World Series; it was never spread at other times. I figure the flaws in the NL format itself will once again cause it to fade away. Limit poker will not likely grow very much; it never a very big part of the gambling scene, even in Las Vegas, but it is sustainable in the long term since it is a good and fair, well-balanced game that provides an edge for a good player while giving casual players a decent run for their money.

SenorBeef covers many of the problems with online poker well – the awful drudgery of playing huge numbers of games with the aid of tracking software making the games simply “unfun” to anybody looking for a good time. The micro-stakes games were a terrible idea and a great example of people demanding something that is not good for them; poker is a game about money – without meaningful stakes it is simply not a good game – and filling the tables with multi-game-HUD-bots destroying the action makes it even worse.

In the beginning the sites would only let you play one game at a time – the way around that was to play on multiple sites at the same – so the sites started letting players sit in two, then four, then 12, then an unlimited number of games.

As for not showing full hand histories – some sites tried that. Collusion cheating quickly became rampant – players, me included, refused to play on sites that did not provide full hand histories. Even with full hand histories cheating in many forms remains rampant in online poker and is likely impossible to stop. The cheating is the reason I chose to retire from poker rather than join the guys moving to Canada and Thailand to continue playing.

To the charge of paying attention to only the American poker situation I plead No Contest, eh.

12

I know all the books say that, but a lot of them were written ten years ago. In real life, I think everyone who plays poker who isn’t 73 years old acknowledges online poker is brutally hard. I noticed it literally one or two sessions into my first attempts at live poker. I couldn’t believe how much easier it was.

Everyone I know from my local rooms will say the same, and many, like me, won’t play online poker or only play little tournaments for fun. I play 5/10 cents while my spouse plays 1/2 cents just so we can have some laughs, but I’d never play serious money games online. Even then, we’re getting tired of how fucking slow the games are because you have idiots multi-tabling 1/2 cent games, God only knows why.

I invite you all to come to Toronto to visit the limit poker room at the Ex, running in August. Limits are spread from 5/10 up to as high as 30/60 (maybe higher, I don’t know what this year will bring.) The room is horrible; untrained dealers, high rakes, nothing is free and such food as is available is hilariously bad. Basically it’s like poker in a big gym. But they spread 20-30 tables of limit poker a night, and you will never, ever see worse poker players in a cardroom today. As I heard one guy put it “It’s not that I can’t put them on a hand; I can’t put them on a thought.” Play ABC poker and my God, how the money rolls in.

If it’s the right day I’d be happy to show you guys some poker.

13

I haven’t played a live game since about 2005 and I haven’t played an online pay game since the UIGEA made it impossible to move money around. The reason I haven’t played live in years is because I’ve spent the last decade living a several hour drive from any poker room. I’ve considered going back to try a game or two now that I’ve moved back near several casinos, but I haven’t yet.

I can see NLHE being dead in the long run for the reasons Turble gives. The problem is, at least a decade ago it was really hard to make money in the limit game live (especially at lower limits) because you could never chase anybody out. Sure, in the long run you can make money, but that’s only if the variance doesn’t kill you first. What I wonder is if the other games that got almost no play a decade ago–draw, stud, maybe razz, perhaps Omaha–are coming back in the live game. It used to be impossible to find a table dealing one of those games.

Here’s what happened in the Albuquerque area with the poker boom. At first, I think only one or two of the casinos nearby had a poker room. As the boom occurred, every casino took some floor space to make a poker room. The tribes in New Mexico only have to pay back 80% on slots (which really makes me wonder why anyone plays them), so they were giving up some slot capacity for relatively low returns on a poker room. Now, some of them still have a poker room, but one got rid of the poker room to put in a high-limit slot machine space and placed a single table at the end of the pit. I really don’t know what they deal there, as I haven’t been in the casino when the table is open. Another one apparently runs a couple tournaments every day, but I don’t know what they deal otherwise and I haven’t been to that casino at all since moving back.

There’s basically one decent poker room nearby, which also happens to be non-smoking. Although it’s open to the rest of the floor, so I’m not sure how much of a difference it really makes. Even they generally won’t deal draw or stud, and a current look at their room through the Bravo Poker Live app suggests that there’s currently a 1-2 NLHE, a 2-4 LHE (probably with a 3-6 kill, at least that’s what they used to do), a 2-5 NLHE, and a 4-8 Omaha. They will apparently also deal 1-2 PLO and 10-20 Omaha Hi/Low once a week or so. And their tournaments aren’t great either. How many would really want to get into the following: NLHE, 4500 chips, 20 min levels, unlimited re-entry for first three levels, max 100 players, $45 buy-in. And that’s the cheapest of the three, but they’re basically all structured like that.

Apparently if I was willing to drive 30 miles west I could get into a 2-10 stud game. So as far as I can tell, there is one stud game within 60 miles of here, unless there’s one at the casino I can’t get info on. So I guess I’ll continue not to play live.

14

Poker has survived for centuries, and will survive for centuries more. When a game gets that ingrained into the culture, it’s nearly impossible for it to go away entirely.

15

I agree poker is here to stay, even if the “boom” is over. Great insights on this thread.

Contradictory to those stories, I actually got turned off to Poker BEFORE the boom. I learned to play in the 90s, got good enough to not embarrass myself at a table, then went to the rare casinos that actually had the game like the Turning Stone in NY, Las Vegas, and a few AC casinos in the very early 2000s. Back then, the players were a colorful but respectful table of cigarette smoking and whiskey sipping characters: old timers, sharpies in bad suits, a few brothers and an older lady or two.

Then I noticed a crop of young douche-bags moved in, they had no table manners or respect for the other players or the game, they would do things like tell the dealer I was going to fold my hand anyway after playing out of turn, snicker with each other, and I could tell these jerks were online players invading the casinos.

I immediately got out of poker and into craps. I haven’t sat down at a real poker table in 10 years or more.

16

How does a full hand history help against collusion cheating? Sorry to be dense…

17

If you suspect someone of collusion, you can look at their hand history and see if something looks off. Then you can report them.

18

I got very into poker in 1997 or so which was the front end of the boom. I studied from books and the very helpful people at rec.gambling.poker for months before I ever sat at a live table. I won my fist time out and did pretty well over the next few years. I kept a spreadsheet so I know for certain that I was long term profitable. This was limit HE usually 4-8 and some 6-12. I could pretty much guarantee that I would pay for my weekend in Vegas with my winnings.

But it eventually got harder to win and less fun as more and more dickheads invaded the game and more and more people studied to the extent I did. I could have moved up limits and worked hard enough to get to the next tier but it wasn’t worth the time it would have taken and it wasn’t fun anymore.

19

Another telling factor: In Las Vegas in “The Big Game” where the famous pros hang out they do not play NLHE, they generally play mixed games like HORSE – Hold 'em [Limit], Omaha Hi/Low, Razz, Stud, Eight or better Stud - or Triple Draw – or maybe Dealer’s Choice. The really only play NLHE when a rich tourist wants to play it.

RE: Hand histories and collusion detection – There are lots of plays that only make sense if two players are colluding. They are pretty easy to spot, but only if you can see the cards they both held. The ease of collusion makes online Hi-Low split games totally unplayable because even when you hold the nuts you much too often end up with only 1/4 of the pot.

I applaud the wisdom of the management at the cardroom RickJay mentioned that chooses to remain Limit only. Those games can continue to flourish. Look around the Limit tables and you’ll see smiling faces and people having fun. If you can’t put them on a hand or even on a thought, that’s the game I want to be in – Just join in the fun and always be sure at the showdown you are showing them a real hand.

20

It was a fad. I know next to nothing about poker, but I know a fad when I see one. Every store had poker chips packaged with decks of cards and a label saying Texas Hold Em! . You could buy little computerized THE games. Poker shows were on every channel. Books on THE were everywhere. Eventually, everybody was into it and then moved on.

I’m not saying poker in general or even THE will disappear. You can still buy hula hoops, electronic pets, fondue sets etc.