How online poker training sites have changed the game forever

One of the more quotable lines from the classic 1965 movie “The Cincinnati Kid” is when Rip Torn’s character, the young gun Slade, asks the grizzled Lancey Howard, played by Edward G. Robinson, “How the hell did you know I didn’t have the king or the ace?” To which Lancey replies, “Son, all you paid was the looking price. Lessons are extra.” It’s this exchange that often creeps into my head when I think about poker training sites, and after hearing WSOP commentator David Tuchman voice the same concerns, it would seem I’m not the only person that feels this way.

Basically, it seems to me that for $30 a month online poker training sites are charging “the looking fee” yet they are peddling the lessons without charging “extra.” It just feels wrong to me to teach someone how to play good poker for such a minimal fee. Players today don’t need to go through the trial and error process, where you have to be a critical thinker to excel at the game. Poker educations in today’s game are bought and sold for what amounts to pennies on the dollar.

On the WSOP live stream Tuchman asked Andrew “LuckyChewy” Lichtenberger if he thought “pros were giving away the knowledge too cheap?” Lichtenberger couched his response, halfheartedly agreeing with Tuchman, but I am in complete agreement with him. It almost infuriates me when I play poker in 2013 and I see the level of skill the average poker player has, and how many players are now average or better. I put a lot of the blame for this on online poker training sites. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the shark-to-fish ratio started to drastically change right around the time online poker training sites started popping up –UIGEA gets a lot of the blame, but UIGEA doesn’t explain why the European sites have the same problem.

Before Cardrunners, StoxPoker, and 3-Bet.com the general makeup of poker players was something like this:

30% were absolutely terrible, 40% were bad, 10% were somewhat competent (still losing players, but selective and aggressive losers), and 10% were capable (near-break-even or better types).

After just a couple of years of training sites those numbers essentially flipped, and now capable and somewhat competent players make up not 30% of the poker community but about 70%, while terrible players are almost extinct.

Now you might say that back in 2004 there were books to buy and articles to read, so I’m being hypocritical when I say training sites were giving away the knowledge too cheap. But this was different; the authors of old did not give away the candy store in these books. Go back and read a poker book from this era and earlier and you’ll see that what the author’s did was give readers a basic groundwork in the game, which was most certainly not enough for them to be long-term winners.

What this groundwork did was make these players easily exploitable, so instead of nine wild, loose-cannons, you would have a table of five loose cannons and a few very exploitable ABC players who followed the words of Sklansky, Brunson, or Jones to the tee. If you wanted the “real” lessons you had to pay; and before poker training sites you paid through experience and critical thinking.

I understand that it’s hard to keep any information under wraps in the Internet era, but it’s really disappointing to me that so many people (who learned the game on the shoulders of giants) have given away the knowledge that it took a small number of people decades to amass in the blink of an eye, for a price I consider far too cheap. My feeling is that there was an unwritten rule in poker about what was discussed openly and what was saved for private conversations, but that all went out the window when poker training sites were created –they didn’t merely tap the glass, they hit it with a hammer.