Damn the UIGEA – Poker Was, Is, and Always Will Be
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Matt Maroon thinks we should all calm down a bit. I agree. Honestly, I think people are blowing a lot of the recent happenings enormously out of proportion.
A few years ago, poker got really, really lucky, and a crazy idea called the World Poker Tour captured people’s imaginations and became the “new big thing.” (FWIW, at the time I really thought it was a crazy idea. I remember thinking it didn’t have a shot at more than a few episodes.) This roughly coincided with the rise of online poker, and the result was ridiculously enormous amounts of money ploughed into the poker economy.
It was inevitable from the very start that this huge surge of interest and cash would be temporary. Poker would not be the “new big thing” forever. Eventually, poker would go back to normal. Back to normal, but with a significantly higher baseline popularity than it had before the surge.
That’s where it’s headed – back to normal. I don’t care about the UIGEA or the feds or whatever. I mean I care, but they definitely aren’t going to “kill” poker. Before Dutch Boyd invented online poker… before Al Gore even invented the internet… poker (legal and illegal) was vibrant and played regularly throughout the country. People played for a living, and many made good livings. Millions enjoyed the game.
Ten years from now millions will still be playing poker – many more millions than were playing poker ten years ago. You will always have ample access to regular poker games. It’s true, if you were 12-tabling the $5-$10 games on Party, then your gravy train may soon be permanently derailed. But, quite frankly, that was gonna happen whether the feds got involved or not. The excesses of the online poker bubble created some really bizarre expectations in many players’ minds of what they could and should make for hourly rates.
We’re headed eventually back to normal poker. You’ll be able to play live. And likely you’ll also be able to play online as well. If you crave regular poker games, you’ll be able to find them in one year, in two years, in five years, in ten years, and probably in fifty years also. They’ll be good, loose, soft games that you can make a living playing (if you want). So don’t sweat the day-to-day stuff so much. Just chalk all the changes we’ll see over the next year up to variance. Eventually everything will be back on track.
Tags: dutch-boyd, matt-maroon, online-poker, poker, uigea, world-poker-tour
). A combination of mistakes, variance, and plain old bad luck led me to lose on every trip we took last year. I’d sit in a $1-$2 $200 buy-in NL game and recognize that I was technically playing outside of my $1,000 or so roll, but I wasn’t worried. If the unfortunate happened and I dropped $100, $200, $400… I’d get back home, drop limits if I had to, and just build it back up online for the next trip. Again, the Mrs. didn’t mind as I never once took money out of our pockets to play.
Speaking of Dutch Boyd, Poker Spot, the online poker room he started has apparently been made open source:
http://code.google.com/p/pokerspot/source
Thread about it here.