Is Poker Fading?

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I've recently noticed a few players who dropped pool for poker, now attending pool tournaments again. Has the poker fad started to wane? I used to be hooked on watching poker on television, but now could care less about it. Has anyone else noticed this?
 
Roll-Off said:
I've recently noticed a few players who dropped pool for poker, now attending pool tournaments again. Has the poker fad started to wane? I used to be hooked on watching poker on television, but now could care less about it. Has anyone else noticed this?
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the odds of winning a poker tournament, they realize, is astronomical. and where they may have had some modicum of pool talent to cash in, the sheer numbers participating in poker is overwhelming.

there are a bazzillian people who think they are competitive in poker, and that's good enough to sustain it for a long time. pool players quit because it's not the "easy money" they thought it would be.
 
A recent study indicated that 60 million americans reported playing poker. Poker is huge and will remain so.
 
mnorwood said:
,,,,,,,,,,, 60 million americans reported playing poker,,,,,,,.
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so much for "if poker can be big, why can't pool" :):):)
 
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I don't watch it anymore and feel right now people think they can make a dollar quick and easy. It takes some skill, a lot of patience and tons of luck. Poker and pool have been around for a long time and both will continue. Some people enjoy playing pool and some enjoy poker. I think that the pool players that come back to pool don't enjoy playing poker as much as pool, and some may find the time to do both. Both require the desire to be a gambler and many hours at the table.
 
Other than the WSOP and the WPT. There are cash ring games in casinos in most states that are just booming with business from $1-$2 games to No-Limit games. There are alot of smaller poker tournaments which cost 20+ dollars up to $25K to enter all around the country. Online poker is 24/7 cash games and tournaments with low buy-ins up to $200+ buyins. There is more opportunity in poker to make money than pool. Just like pool there are a varity of games other than Texas Holdem and 9-ball that players specialize in. And in casinos they are offered all in one room as well as online.

Debating the luck v. skill factor between both is fruitless to the person(s) who just wants to make money, weather it be alot or extra income each week. With poker online, players don't have to deal with idiots and assholes, you can just turn off the chat button. So is poker slowing down? Not in the least bit. As more and more states are getting casinos, poker and other forms of gaming will most likely pull players away from the pool tables. At least the pool players who live most of there days in pool room waiting and waiting for action. The ease of which casino gaming is more attractive to them.

Pool to be good at it and to make money in tournaments and from matching up for cash it just too difficult to learn and takes too long to get really good at it. Casino gaming and particually poker takes only weeks - months to get good at if you plan on having any kind of success. Pool takes years. Being a pool enthusiest or just having a love of the game is one thing, but trying to make money from it is another. Most money pool players love to gamble, being competitive and thrive to win to make the money. That includes playing for days on end marathon matches, spending alot of time just to set up matches with other players (have to give spots, get spots, games on the wire etc..), traveling on the road to play for money and the BS that goes along with that and having to deal with idiots and assholes as well.

When all they have to do is step into a casino with there money and not have to deal with all of the BS and just gamble either against the house or other players in a professional environment. Thats at least part of why poker will continue to grow.
 
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Poker is really the "everyman's" gambling game. Everyone thinks they can bluff the other players. With the advent of televised poker the game is now easily accessible to millions through the internet, local games and tournaments, and casinos. Poker cuts across all walks of life and the only inequality at the table is the size of your stack and ability to buy back in.

The odds of becoming a millionaire through poker are certainly much higher than the lottery with a cheaper buy in over the long run. I believe the "fad" of poker is fading but the game as a big-time tournament and recreational activity is firmly planted.

The thing with pool players and poker is this in my opinion. In poker a pool player can be beaten fairly easily by someone who can't draw the ball two feet. They can be manhandled by skill or luck by people that they feel superior to just because the pool player has a physical skill that is connected to gambling. So, in the pool player's mind the bad beats are that much much tougher to bear. Now, with them getting creamed by soccer mom's :-)) they are turning back towards their first skill.

I know of one decent pool player who has won over a $100,000 in tournament poker winnings this year. Now he is a good score in pool. So who knows? Maybe success in poker for pool players means that some of that money will come back in the form of bigger bets.

I am no good at poker or pool. Although, I did win the first little poker tournament I entered. My friends and I were just coming home from a road trip where we did all right. We stopped at a local pool room where they have a card table and endless $20 mini-tournaments on the poker table. There was no pool action so I decided to sit down at the poker table. I won the first mini-tournament and my friend says to me, "where did you learn to play cards, we have been putting you in the wrong game?" I replied, "the Travel channel, Wednsday nights at 10pm."

John
 
I have played the various card games growing up with family and friends and also got hooked up in the Texas Holdem fad when it started a few years ago. I have since placed money on PokerStars and in the year I have been playing and keeping my stats I am up about $900 as of today. (I cashed out $600 for my trip to Vegas for APA Nationals). Not very much for the amount of time and effort to grind my way up to that amount. I don't know what my personal issue is with gambling pool (maybe its not having the stake on me at that moment) but I have no problems with throwing down a few hundred at the holdem table and yet feel sqeamish about playing a race to 5 for $20. The holdem is both skill and luck and you need the cards, but playing that set of pool should be a sure thing if the matchup is right. Gonna start to get back into the pool money again...
 
Poker has something WE need..........

What has made Poker soooooo popular is not just the showing of the hole card but also the fact that any dummy can sit down and play with the best players in the world - IF THEY HAVE THE MONEY.

The majority of players in these big poker tournaments are coming from Internet play. This enables them to attract thousands (if not millions) of NEW players every day.

Pool needs to either be player friendly (that will never happen) OR it must become viewer friendly. To become viewer friendly it must present a format that appeals to the masses and entertains.
The key word is ENTERTAINMENT - not "shock & awe" at seeing Efren run 5 racks of 9 Ball. They can't relate to that!
It has to be something that "Joe Six-Pack" can relate to and become involved in.

As far as the pool players playing poker - eventually even they will realize that poker is much more luck than skill.

TY & GL
 
UWPoolGod1 said:
I have played the various card games growing up with family and friends and also got hooked up in the Texas Holdem fad when it started a few years ago. I have since placed money on PokerStars and in the year I have been playing and keeping my stats I am up about $900 as of today. (I cashed out $600 for my trip to Vegas for APA Nationals). Not very much for the amount of time and effort to grind my way up to that amount. I don't know what my personal issue is with gambling pool (maybe its not having the stake on me at that moment) but I have no problems with throwing down a few hundred at the holdem table and yet feel sqeamish about playing a race to 5 for $20. The holdem is both skill and luck and you need the cards, but playing that set of pool should be a sure thing if the matchup is right. Gonna start to get back into the pool money again...
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When you gamble at pool there are no excuses other then you got beat. People don't like to admit or face that. It is easy to bet on a dog or a football game a blame it on them, but you don't have that luxury in pool. When you get beat on the pool table it is a personal defeat, he is better then you. People often don't like to expose themselves to that so they make excuses not to play to protect themselves from want they perceive as a personal failure. There is also the quit factor, in the pool game you have to quit admitting defeat. The on line poker is for the most part anonymous and no one will ever know if you blew all your money. I rarely believe what players tell me when they are taking about on line poker.
 
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I have mentioned this before, but the poker boom will level off some. It will still be popular, but not at record levels. You will get some players returning from poker to other hobbies. Poker is popular because the new or mediocre player can get lucky and win huge. But there is a flip side to this. And that is a lot of players will lose long term. Most poker players don't realize how good you have to be to be a long term significant winner. And sometimes very good players will hit big losing streaks. A winning player can have a 300 BB downswing pretty easily. So what can a bad player expect? Also, no limit cash games were dead before the poker boom. Why? Because the bad players get broke so fast the game dies. So a no limit cash game starts and lasts until the live ones get broke. The NL cash games would happen around the tournaments. The gamblers and some of the tournament plyers would donate to the NL ring game players for a few weeks. Now there are tons of NL cash games, although with limited buy ins that slow the losses of the bad players. But there are a lot of players losing a lot of money out there. At some point they will retun to their former hobbies. They will say they "won a little" or "broke about even" but got tired of it.
 
I think the poker thing is definitly leveling off.It also takes much more skill to cash in poker then luck in the long haul.The cream always rises as in any game.Pool players have a little luck involved but not as much as poker.You can make a great shot and still wind up behind the 8 ball.The same with poker,you have the nuts going in and someone gets lucky on the river when they shouldn't even been in the pot.
I also dont know how anyone plays online poker.You have no idea who you are playing against or how the computer spits out the cards.You could be in a room with 5 friends in the other room just waiting for some guy to lose all his money.
jmho
 
Roll-Off said:
I've recently noticed a few players who dropped pool for poker, now attending pool tournaments again. Has the poker fad started to wane? I used to be hooked on watching poker on television, but now could care less about it. Has anyone else noticed this?
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Look at the numbers for the WSOP for the last few years, poker is growing and continues to grow at amazing rates. Oh and poker isn't a fad, it's hear to stay, if it was a fad it would have started fading a while ago.
 
OldHasBeen said:
As far as the pool players playing poker - eventually even they will realize that poker is much more luck than skill.

TY & GL
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All things considered, I believe that poker is definitely more lucrative than pool. I think winning big at poker is very difficult, but making steady money at it is not that difficult for a skilled player. I have found it very difficult to make money steadily at pool though.
 
PoolBum said:
All things considered, I believe that poker is definitely more lucrative than pool. I think winning big at poker is very difficult, but making steady money at it is not that difficult for a skilled player. I have found it very difficult to make money steadily at pool though.
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Steady money at poker is easy? Is this why the average long term winning player has an IQ of like 140? Is this why so many good players are broke? Look, I agree it is easier to make a profession of poker. Steady money is easier. And it has become much easier since the boom hit. But wait 10 years and see how many people can make a living at poker. Very often the ones that can could do something more lucrative. Very often the people who can win say 75K year in, year out, are in fact smart enough to be rocket scientists. If by steady money you mean being a small winner who supplements their day job, it is much easier, you are right. But to be a full time professional poker player for 15-20 years is much harder than people think.
 
bobroberts said:
I think the poker thing is definitly leveling off.It also takes much more skill to cash in poker then luck in the long haul.The cream always rises as in any game.Pool players have a little luck involved but not as much as poker.You can make a great shot and still wind up behind the 8 ball.The same with poker,you have the nuts going in and someone gets lucky on the river when they shouldn't even been in the pot.
I also dont know how anyone plays online poker.You have no idea who you are playing against or how the computer spits out the cards.You could be in a room with 5 friends in the other room just waiting for some guy to lose all his money.
jmho
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Ya know, I never until this moment considered the fact that playing poker on the internet is an EASY way to cheat at poker. All it takes is for several players to sit down at a table together and simply be IMing as a group what cards they have to take off the other players. It's like telepathy.

I wonder how the internet rooms combat it? Wow, I bet there are some groups raking it in on this scam.

John - staying out of internet poker, except on yahoo games for FREE.
 
onepocketchump said:
Ya know, I never until this moment considered the fact that playing poker on the internet is an EASY way to cheat at poker. All it takes is for several players to sit down at a table together and simply be IMing as a group what cards they have to take off the other players. It's like telepathy.

I wonder how the internet rooms combat it? Wow, I bet there are some groups raking it in on this scam.

John - staying out of internet poker, except on yahoo games for FREE.
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of course it's being done.

i'm wondering if there's any sophisticated software ormonitors who can catch patterns in betting behavior.
 
JPB said:
Steady money at poker is easy? Is this why the average long term winning player has an IQ of like 140? Is this why so many good players are broke? Look, I agree it is easier to make a profession of poker. Steady money is easier. And it has become much easier since the boom hit. But wait 10 years and see how many people can make a living at poker. Very often the ones that can could do something more lucrative. Very often the people who can win say 75K year in, year out, are in fact smart enough to be rocket scientists. If by steady money you mean being a small winner who supplements their day job, it is much easier, you are right. But to be a full time professional poker player for 15-20 years is much harder than people think.
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Its even harder to be a professional pool player for 15-20 years. Winning big in poker as in pool is really difficult. Winning little to add to your day job income is more realistic as you have stated. Just like in pool you have to start young (21 for poker) and waste a few years at poker and at pool to see if you can be successful on a full time basis. We live in a time now that on a day to day basis, this economy is traveling to fast and its too easy to get left behind. So the time frame to be successful at most anything has to happen fast or your out on the street. Pool takes years be good at and you have to be a teenager with some talent and have no resposiblities to hinder your progress to have a shot at being successful today. Poker, can be learned online, through dvds and books and be applied in competition immeditly. You can say the same for pool as well, but the learning curve is much steeper and time is not the pool players side.

Like some of these young guys at the WSOP who have won some of the $1500 events and walked away with anywhere from $50K- $600K definitly have a huge head start at becoming a pro poker player. Thats what pool needs a big prize pool so when a player wins an event, that money will help sustain a players career. Like I have stated in other threads, all major tournaments should have bigger entry fees like poker. All the pool players who play for money are always bragging how they play for 10's of thousands of dollars, but complain or refuse to pay the $500 entry fee into an event like the US Open.

With the IPT, this might be possible.
 
I don't know what statistic shows that poker is leveling off...........last year there were 2,567 players in the main event for a pay day of 5million to first place. This year there were 5,619 players in the main event for a pay day of 7.5million. Thats 119% increase in the number of participants from 2004 to 2005.
 
bruin70 said:
of course it's being done.

i'm wondering if there's any sophisticated software ormonitors who can catch patterns in betting behavior.
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A pool playing programmer that I know has been working on Arificial Intelligence Poker programs and statistics, etc in his spare time for two years now. He says that he has his program able to play for him while he is away from the comp. Not sure how truthful it is but I have BS'd with him for a few hours about it since he knows I took some programming in school and it seems to me to be legit. Says he left for his shift and came back and was up $250. Told me I could buy it from him for $300 if I tried it out and liked it. I think I'll keep my money and grind it out legally.

Some friends of mine have done the IM thing and also used their webcams with audio/video link up to make it even easier to communicate. There is really no profit in it if you play with more than two players since single table games only pay three places and it is unlikely that all three of you are going to make the final three. They gave up after a few times with larger groups.
 
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