How poker players misconstrue the poker community

I see this happen quite often, someone on 2+2 or some other forum/blog/website will explain how the “poker community” wants this or that, or how this is an indication of the wishes of the “poker community,” or how people are misleading the “poker community.” The problem with this thinking is that most people don’t really grasp how diverse the poker community is, or how it functions.

The poker community is made up of three main subgroups:

• Group A: Poker pros and poker activists
• Group B: Poker enthusiasts
• Group C: Casual poker players

Group A are the people you encounter on 2+2 and other forums, and generally are the people you hear from as they are the ones who participate in the conversation. Unfortunately, Group A only accounts for about 5% of the poker community –maybe up to 10% depending on how you characterize someone who is “plugged in” to what is going on in the poker world.

Group B represents a much larger swath of the poker community, probably about 25%. These are the people that play poker a couple days a week, follow the latest major tournament results, and visit forums and poker news websites looking for interesting stories but don’t really contribute. They are not interested in the minutiae of the story, just the gist.

Group C embodies the majority of the so-called poker community –the remaining two-thirds or so. These are the people that play in a home game, head to a casino every now and then, and wouldn’t be able to differentiate between Mason Malmuth and Ike Haxton. If a poker story isn’t on the front-page of Yahoo they likely have no idea about it.

The reason I bring this up is that far too often people talk about the poker community as if it is solely Group A and to a lesser extent Group B. They expect everyone in the poker community to have complete knowledge of the details of what is going on; which is hardly the case.

The truth is, most of the “poker community” has no clue what something like multi-accounting is, never mind what the negative impacts of the practice are. For most “poker players” the conversation regarding boycotting the Venetian Poker Room would go something like this:

“Who is Sheldon Adelson? And you say he owns the Venetian? Ok, so what did he say about online poker?”

Now, you might counter that these aren’t really representatives of the poker community, but they most certainly are! These are the people that are the driving force of the poker community, without them there is no game. Their ignorance of the strategies (which we want) also extends to the machinations of the poker industry (which we abhor) and it’s the tradeoff we have to make to keep poker chugging along. So you can’t argue that they are just ignorant and need to be educated: They either 1) don’t care, or 2) will become a good player.

Let’s put it this way: You are not going to find a person educated on the talking points of the “Poker is skill” debate to be a complete fish at the tables.

So, when we say “the poker community is in almost complete agreement on x” what we really mean to say is, “Group A of the poker community (about 5-10%) is in almost complete agreement on x.”

I’ll give you some recent examples where people from Group A overestimate the poker community’s overall level of knowledge on a topic, which leads them to think there is a consensus when there isn’t, and/or overestimate the impact of the issue on the poker community:

The boycott of the Venetian Poker Room

As much as I love Nolan Dalla, and everything he does for poker, the boycott was doomed to failure from the start. For one thing, even “plugged-in” people had no idea it was even happening. More importantly, 99% of the visitors to the Venetian are not poker players or are Group C players, and just sort of find their way to a poker table, so the room would NEVER be empty even if the entire 2+2 community went along with the boycott.

PokerStars is Full Tilt; Full Tilt is PokerStars!

Here is an interesting experiment: Go to a local home game and ask the participants (individually) what they know about Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars, Lock Poker, legal US poker, etc. You will be stunned at the responses! Most people have no idea that PokerStars bought Full Tilt, or that PokerStars repaid players, or even what Black Friday meant. Furthermore, go ahead and try to explain it to them, and you can watch them tune you out about two sentences in.

Do you have a favorable opinion of the PPA?

The poll on 2+2 is being cited as an actual piece of evidence of the PPA’s standing in the poker community. This is probably the most extreme example of people misunderstanding what the poker community is, as they are not simply going by Group A, but specifically by Group A players who visit the 2+2 NVG forum.

The REAL Poker Community

In each of the above cases we see a huge misjudgment of what the poker community is, and how we should reach out to it. It’s a matter of associating with like-minded people: All the people I hang out with and converse with know about this therefore everyone knows about this. The problem is, the people you are discussing this with on 2+2 represent just a small segment of a small segment of the poker community as a whole.

2+2 and its 370,000 members may seem massive, but let’s put things in a little perspective: the most users ever online was 15,000 (on Black Friday) if we double that number to reflect all forums we are talking about 30,000 people that are relatively “aware” of what is going on in the poker world –Group A and B.

But what about the claim that there are 50,000,000 poker players in the US, and just as many more around the globe, how can this be if only 30,000 people were following Black Friday? Perhaps a better indicator of the size of the poker community is the PPA and their 1.2 million PPA members. if we use the low-end number and say the poker community consists of 1.2 million people, and 30,000 of them are at least casual browsers of 2+2 and other forums, we only have about 2.5% of the poker community following the Black Friday story.

If we revisit the PPA poll we see less than 400 people responded, yet people are treating this poll as if it is a judgment against the PPA and a reasonable measure of the way the poker community feels about the organization. The thread has 5,000 views, less than the 6,000 views the thread titled “Australian government gets mobile poker apps removed from Apple store” has received.