How the poker world continues to evolve

In their new book, Don’t Listen to Phil Hellmuth, Dusty Schmidt and Paul Hoppe are not bashing the strategies per se, what they are doing is bashing people that still follow these once useful rules and guidelines in what is a vastly changed poker world. With the speed that information is now readily available to us, poker has seen an explosion of knowledge delivered to the masses, and the idea of the majority of players armed with this information has led to the need for more in-depth strategies and counter-strategies to be developed.

From the time poker took shape as we know it up until the early 1990’s poker strategies could be equated to airplane technology; what I mean by this is that there was little change in the way a winning player approached the game in 1910, and how they would approach the game in 1970 -Just like an Airplane built in the 1970’s is not all that different from one rolling off the assembly line today. However, in today’s poker world the game is much more akin to a computer, or a smart-phone, in that the game is evolving so rapidly it’s hard to keep up with everything -so if you are using strategies developed in the 1990’s you are woefully behind the times, even strategies from a couple of years ago are likely to be outdated.

I started thinking about this when members of an Internet Poker Forum I frequent brought up the idea of highlighting older threads (I believe he termed them “EPIC” threads). I made the point that things I believed to be true even two or three years ago I now have a completely different view on, and that the game changes so rapidly much of this content will be out of date.

For instance, what the best poker players use to do intuitively, what used to be termed as “feel” in the poker world have been solved and are available to the masses. Now these once whimsical concepts and strategies have been analyzed and for all intents and purposes, genetically mapped, and every time a new strategy or idea is introduced, it’s only a few weeks before the counters and opposing strategies come to light -things like calculating the bubble factor or dissecting fold equity for instance use to be done on a subconscious level but now they can be dissected by anyone with a computer.

Look at how quickly strategies for Double or Nothing Sit & Go’s have been developed, and as more and more players implement these strategies they quickly become outdated as newer, counter, strategies take their place!