The Poker Bubble has popped Part 3

In Part 1 of this series I discussed the current state of poker and where in my opinion the poker world had gone wrong. In Part 2 of this series I spoke about poker losing its social characteristics and how young poker players’ attitudes towards their opponents can drive potential players away.  In this the final part of this series I will touch on two more factors that are hurting poker’s chances for continued popularity over the long-run.

Poker is becoming “solved”

The single largest detriment that computers have brought to poker is raw data. Players no longer have to build a lifetime experience to see if their theories are right or wrong, they have all of this information conveniently at the their fingertips.

Poker will never be truly “solved” but the vast majority of situations are now solvable for skilled players and with more and more skilled players disseminating this information, more and more players are able to access it. So what we are left with is a game where players pass money back and forth and only scant crumbs of profit to be made at the margins.

The stakes are too damn high

Much like the comic-gold of the “The Rent is Too Damn High” Gubernatorial campaign of Jimmy McMillan, poker is undergoing its own out of control spending spree, and I simply have to declare, “The Stakes are Too Damn High!”

My problem is; what happened to middle limit games? It seems now that people are only interested in grinding low-stakes games or playing in high-stakes games. $10/$20 and $20/$40 limit games used to be staples in casinos, now they have been replaced by $1/$2 NLHE and a ridiculous amount of $4/$8 games (sometimes $3/$6 or $8/$16 depending on where you are).  These are the live poker examples but this also holds true online.

You might be asking, why is this an issue? Casual players are looking for these games, and if all the players are playing too high for them, or too low for them to bother, so they spend their money elsewhere. The $10/$20 and $20/$40 stakes allowed casual poker players to feel like big shots for a night, sitting in a $4/$8 game doesn’t accomplish the same thing.

I equate it to when a person takes a pay-cut but doesn’t change their lifestyle habits; what we have are poker players who are so used to playing high-stakes games during the poker boom –when there were so many new players that these middle stakes games were receiving a constant influx of new players transitioning from the low-stakes tables—and now they simply can’t bring themselves to move back down now that the poker economy has cooled off.