No one I know that played recreationally in 2006-2010 and deposited hundreds a week or month on UB ever think about poker anymore. Not even home games.
STT related also but I went from 30+ percent ROI to teens to single digits through that era. I studied ICM and studied hands and posted in the STT forum a ton through it. The games definitely got harder.
ETA: I do have 3 Step 4 tickets to the Monthly Million now but they never seem to fill lol
I didnât mean compared to now. I meant comparing 2011 to prior years. I realize that games got worse, but it is not clear to me that the popularity of online poker was actually declining or that revenue was declining.
At Party Poker in most STTs you could just push any two on the bubble and the short stack would get blinded out cussing at you after the match before ever calling without a pair or huge face cards lmao. Best of times.
That poker these days would be unbearable though. Everything was 9 max.
Every mtt and sng was 20 min blinds.
i still donât understand what makes poker fun and not fun for people, except the making money part.
The learning the game through trial and error rather than training vids/training sites was the most fun part for me. Also there were 6 max games in 2003 on PP/UB so that has been around a long time. Less multitabling. Lotâs of fun games running around the clock online like triple draw and o8. For the most part all that is gone and replaced by gto hud zombies.
Okay but youâve learnt the game. So another âpoker boomâ will not make it more fun for you
Okay you edited some stuff which just sounds like cliches to me that almost completely contradict each other at each sentence. There is basically no gto hud zombies. In 06 all we did is wait for premiums and print money. You got people here talking about how they just folded their way to a 30% roi in sngs but apparently that was lifeful?
As i see it there are only two reasons why poker can become less fun for anyone â
It wasnt more interesting back then. It was way less
Going back to my original post. I was addressing the question of why crypto didnât create a poker boom. My point was it helped it survive but there wonât be another 2003 style boom. At least not for a long time. People have mostly moved on. Those that havenât arenât fun to play with.
Also in 2003 you had all your friends playing poker. There were bar poker games almost every night of the week. The WSOP/WPT was must watch tv. Playing poker in a card room wasnât the dreadful experience it is now. If you lived through that you know what I mean.
There is nothing wrong if you like and still play poker. It is in better shape than 2001 when i started playing. Itâs in no danger of going back to that either. Maybe I personally just got bored with it also so I agree with point number two above.
Playing poker in a card room isnt a dreadful experience now. Thats my point. You changed. The games are ridic soft and the play is far faster than it was back in 05. You are just not 25 years old and while you might be the exception, most of the people claiming this just dont enjoy being the marks, so anyone who took some time to improve becomes a gto zombie.
If anything, live poker in the usa is now at its peak softness in relation to the rest of the world.
I am mostly talking about online cash games being filled with multitabling hud zombies. The apps arenât like that but US facing sites outside of Bovada mostly have been. I havenât played live in years so maybe it is much better now I honestly wouldnât know.
I dunno what gto hud zombies are suppose to be. gto play is far more aggressive than anything youve ever encountered (which is suppose to be âfunâ if fun arguments were real). It also served the exact opposite purpose of huds.
But lets stop the derail, i dont see how iâll be convinced that poker boom nostalgia is anything but laziness/inability to improve and i donât see how you will/should care about my thoughts.
Iâm not even a NL player but right now Iâd be in the top 5% in the nl100 stars zoom pool. The games arenât tough. Basically no one studies or improves.
Some people get a HUD, but it hurts them as much as it helps.
And this isnât even close to how soft and action live play is in a the us now. LA/FL/TX game are absurd.
2011 and 2021 are weirdly when the games were softest tbh. In 2011 everyone tried to imitate Dwan and uh, it did not go well for those people long term.
2021 is âI play in a 2/5 game that has 4 straddles and a double board bomb pot every orbit. Smallest stack is 400bbâ
For limit games youâre correct. NL games are currently a dreadful experience. One of the few things I agree with MM on is that the popularization of NL as a cash game has been a major negative to poker rooms. NL is great for tournaments. In cash games it leads to the best players having too much of an edge and the bad players losing too much too fast and not coming back.
This is a bit of a meaningless point because people arent intetested in playing limit games. The wait lists in vegas this summer were absurd. The games were super soft. Same in cali, texas, florida.
Yeah, this is definitely a topic where Iâm old man yells at cloud, but limit games are so much better for cash games and NLHE is the dumbest form of poker.
Thatâs why everyone plays PLO.
Iâve played the like 20 game mixes at Aria and local 08 and stuff but man, limit games always end up with me as the youngest player by 25 years and OMC just generally arenât a fun group.
I just dont enjoy a form of poker where you can play the crossword after folding and youâre not losing EV for it.
It also just isnât satisfying to outplay someone or set them up, win a hand vs them and profit 6bb.
Basically agreed with every single YUV take.