[QUOTE=Oliver Busquet]
One thing that genuinely annoys me about trying to make poker more popular is that most people aren’t willing to accept a simple reality: the poker boom was a unique combination of events that will NEVER come back - the good players are too good and there are too many of them.
[/QUOTE]
That’s essentially it IMO. Short-handed, short-stacked poker is largely solved. Deep stackers who use guile and experience that had to sharpen their skills over decades at the table have been replaced by professional short-stackers and Game Theory nerds that simply skim a few bucks off sub-optimal play and take their winnings home at the end of the day.
It really is a case of the poker community eating their own. Sites have tried making things more “gambley” by introducing things such as Spin-and-Gos, or anonymous tables, but every time a place tries to do something to make the environment more inviting to new or casual players, regs have a conniption.
So unfortunately I think poker WILL have a future. I think it’s just going to be a future that’s going to make the game largely indistinguishable from other forms of gambling.
Believe it or not, I think daily fantasy sports is eating up a lot of time for former poker players. Those sites specifically target online poker players and they’ve obviously been pretty successful.
The way you guys describe poker, it seems like there are two parts to poker:
as a game
as a moneymaking activity
As a game, it doesn’t seem that much fun compared to video games or sports and the demographic groups that are most attracted to poker now have video games.
As a moneymaking activity, it sounds an awful lot like a pyramid scheme. Those can’t go on without an infinite supply of suckers feeding those above.
Heh, the most frustrated I ever was at a poker hand was at a 2-2 THE limit game. I had AA, and was squeezed between two raisers. Flop was 3 non-ace broadway cards rainbow. STILL got squeezed. Since I figured they weren’t stupid enough to raise with two non-ace broadway cards pre-flop, I put them on trips max, so I knew I had at least 6 outs to get part of it, and maybe they were playing with low pp. Turn didn’t help anyone and I still got squeezed. Stayed against my better judgement. River was a 9, one person bet, I called, other person simply called. Better had 99, caller had 33. In retrospect, with perfect knowledge I was right to have stayed but got rivered.
Every poker room I’ve seen in Florida will have at least an interest list for PLO, with the large ones dealing PLO and Omaha Hi-Lo every day. The Isle at Pompano Beach spreads 6-12 OE but they chase the low so much that with Omaha you will always get quartered with the low and can seldom scoop the high in Stud because someone will always hit the low.
Look at the late 50s, early 60s bowling boom. Sometimes it seemed like there was an alley in every block, but there certainly was in every shopping plaza. Then it all went belly-up. Of course there are still bowling alleys around today. Boom and bust. All fads do it.
