Has Poker Reached a Tipping Point? (Part 1)

One of my favorite authors being Malcolm Gladwell, the title for this article has to do with his bestseller, Tipping Point. Throughout the book Gladwell exposes/ponders/questions what makes things take-off or crash, regardless whether it’s in a good or bad way. The theory works out perfectly for the 2003 B-O-O-M poker experienced, but my question today is this: Has poker reached a tipping point, where players can no longer be successful unless they are exceptional?

What I am alluding to is whether or not a decent poker player can show a solid, long-term, profit in the game: And I have three basic arguments to make:

1.      The tipping point actually occurred in 2006, a time when everyone and his grandmother was playing poker.

2.      There needs to be a certain number of bad players -”Feeders”-for each winning player.

3.      The gap between the best players and the worst players has shrunk dramatically.

The tipping point actually occurred in 2006

In 2006, the poker world was an ocean of oysters, each packing a mighty fine pearl. Anyone with even the slightest bit of knowledge was capable of making $50k a year playing poker: Literally people were throwing their money at you. While there are still a lot of bad players, there is without a doubt less, and the horrendously bad players either quit the game or learn to be better poker players.

In 2006, the US boom was at its peak, and the game had just taken off internationally, bringing even more fresh blood into the poker-rooms around the world -both online and brick & mortar. But this is also the time poker ceased being a card-game and became a business. Poker players began to realize that their secrets, and their name, were worth a hell of a lot more than their card-playing skills, and these players began selling trade secrets, and turning themselves into businesspeople.

• Books were written by the dozens, by anyone who had final-tabled a televised tournament
• Online forums and blogs gave players the outlets they needed to improve
• Online training sites began popping-up across the Internet
• Lower stakes games gave bad players a reprieve
• Tracking software and online sites became more prevalent

You see in the old days -pre-2003-poker books were scarce and tended to focus on the basic strategies of the game -Which allowed the players whose knowledge went beyond these strategies to manipulate these “book-smart” players like a puppeteer. However, as the market became flooded with books it took a little bit more, and more, and more, information to get your book published: Until finally you had books like Harrington on Holdem that made any player who read the 3-Part series a legitimate threat in a tournament! All of this information armed potential poker players with the knowledge to be, at the very least, a nuisance to seasoned pros.

Books aside, the blogosphere went crazy with poker fever, and a new poker forum was seemingly springing up every week. And all of this information was completely free! 15 year-olds could Google “poker strategy”, and in a few hours of reading they would be beating low-limit games. Before, players would deposit a few hundred dollars, lose that, and repeat the cycle 5 or 6 more times. Then, maybe buy a poker book -if they didn’t swear off the game. Now that information was just a mouse-click away. And just like books, the content became more and more diverse, technical, and informative.

In addition to books and Online Poker resources, another innovation was the online training site: Where poker’s young guns decided, why write a book for $50,000 (if you were a well known player) when I could start a training site and charge a $100 sign-up fee and $30/month? And all I have to do is make videos! And it was these training sites that closed the gap even further: If books made bad players decent, then training sites made decent players good.

As Online Poker became more popular the truly horrid players realized they didn’t have to lose $1,000 in a session to play poker, they could play as willy-nilly as they wanted to and lose anywhere from $5 to $50 because the Online Poker sites offer such low stakes. In a card-room you won’t see anything below $2/$4 limit or a $1/$3 Stud game; or anything lower than $1/$2 no limit. Online players will find games with $2 buy-ins!!! So, the segment of horrible players now had an option, an option they never had before. And there is no money to be made from these players anymore.

The final nail in the coffin was the widespread use of tracking software. As soon as you get your hands on Poker Tracker, Holdem Manager, or Poker Office it’s difficult to not be a passable poker player -you’d probably have to work hard to lose in low and mid-limit games if you are utilizing tracking software. Tracking software closed every conceivable gap in ability.