For a while now there’s been a bunch of talk on the forums about how the halcyon days are over and games are now much tougher. I only started playing a couple of years ago, so don’t really know what it was like back in 2003 (that sounds so stupid, like we’re talking about decades ago. I guess it probably still feels like that to these 20-something whippersnappers who donked off their college years).
Still, that doesn’t stop me having a theory/opinion on what’s happening 
I should imagine back in the early days the playing field consisted of two groups of players – live players who added online play to their game for fun, and internet savvy nerds who saw online poker like any other online video game. The nerds quickly formed forums which disseminated information from books such as Sklansky’s stuff, and rapidly learnt to play the TAG style which could beat the live players.
The live players were at all stakes, and the nerds could rapidly progress up the stakes, finding easy targets at every step of the way. These were the good times. You didn’t even have to be that good. Just better than the live players.
Early 2003 had about between 5 to 10 thousand people online at peak times. Lots of nerds really, but in comparison to the live players the ratio favoured them and easily fed their climb through the stakes.
Now we have 80 to 100 thousand people online at peak times. The increase has probably been mostly from the nerds rather than the live players. The increase is still going on and doesn’t appear to be slowing down.
My theory is that the microstakes have probably become easier – vast fields of nerds who’ve never played poker before, picked up a few tips from some websites, and are hoping to make the big bucks they’ve read about. The higher stakes games will have become harder since the players donating their live bankrolls have become vastly outnumbered by nerds who have climbed the stakes (and so not only have forum education but experience of 100′s of thousands of hands).
The former players who easily climbed the stakes back in the day will now struggle against the best of the new generation of nerds. We’re seeing this more and more now as the former stars struggle to stay in the game. Ironically many of them are moving to live games to maintain their income.
Seeing this many people are predicting the death of the game – it’s all drying up! For many people this is probably true – the difference is that now you actually have to be good at poker. The average college drop out won’t succeed, while the intelligent college drop out will. Furthermore the huge increase in the number of players means that the actual amount of money in the game becomes much more massive.
The final result is probably like any sport in the modern era – many decades ago any reasonably athletic person with time to train could make it and make some money, and now only the best of the best can make it, but they will earn insane amounts of money. Poker will be the same – only the best of the best will make it to the absolute top, but the amount of money they will make will dwarf the 20-something ballers of 2003. The average players will make less relatively, but probably more than the average player back in 2003. The losers will lose the same, the only difference is that there will be vastly more of them…
The first signs of this are coming through. Here’s a guy who won two million dollars last year playing limit hold’em. $2m by just grinding – find someone who did that back in 2003.
The question looking ahead though is what happens when the world starts to really notice that individuals are making tens of millions of dollars online? IMGEA will probably seem like a storm in a teacup at that point…
I’d hazard a guess that the perceived illegality of online poker in the US has wiped out many of the live players who are not going to investigate further on how they can actually play online. This leaves the nerds who do put in the effort and read the forums to see how they can play.
That’s true. Looks like you’re in a better position to see if my ‘just stick it out there opinion’ has any merit – from my microstakes point of view there’s definitely more people who barely know the rules of poker than nerds.
It’s a shame the Americans are struggling with legalities, especially as we should probably be thankful that America had a big home poker culture to kickstart (or effectively fund) the whole thing.
If they ever sort out the legallities of online poker in the US. The massive infux of live players could create pokers second summer of love