The Golden Age of Poker and its legacy

This is a follow-up of sorts to my Do you still want to be a poker pro post from yesterday.

When I first started playing poker (taking poker seriously anyway, and playing for any meaningful stakes) in the early 2000’s a live poker player participating in a $10/$20 Limit Holdem Game wasn’t just playing for peanuts, this was considered a mid-stakes game in these days! Then in the midst of the poker boom, a $10/$20 Limit Holdem player was considered at the bottom of the food chain, games which rarely ran in most card-rooms in the early part of the decade, and were considered “high-limits” in most locales, like $50/$100 or $80/$160, were suddenly included in the term “mid-limits”.

Now, with the poker economy on a severe downswing (thanks to a number of factors like the overall skill of the average poker player improving and of course Black Friday and Full Tilt Poker taking some $300 million out of the economy) $10/$20 Limit games are once again becoming mid-limit games.

This is even more evident online, where players who used to participate in $25/$50 NLHE games are now found in the $3/$6 games, and it’s not only because of the damage done by Black Friday and Full Tilt Poker, a lot of it has to do with the games becoming so tough online that it’s difficult to find a good seat in anything above what used to be considered an entry level game.

The Golden Age of poker seems to be coming to a close, although a second poker boom could easily occur should the US government decide to alter their current course and legalize and regulate the online poker market. Basically, without a new infusion of BRAND NEW poker players, poker players who are learning the game as they go, poker players are going to have to realize that making $1 million a year playing cards is now reserved for only the very best poker players in the world, maybe a score at the most.

For the rest of the Poker Pros out there, they will have to learn to live on a much smaller salary –similar to the way poker players grinded out their profits before the poker boom, when $50,000 a year from poker was considered a good salary. It’s simply not a good time to be a poker pro.

The days of players utterly dominating their opposition, and winning tens-of-thousands of dollars each and every month are pretty much over; Poker Pros have to realize this and learn to live on less. More importantly, people getting into the game will also need to realize that all of the success stories they heard about just three, four, and five years ago are simply no longer possible; poker has changed, and the players need to change along with it.

There will never be another period in poker like 2003-2006; the game has simply progressed to the point where players can learn to play a very solid game in a very short period of time. What the poker boom’s legacy may very well be is that it changed the game from being played between sharks and fish, to being played by mostly break-even type players.