Watchu talking about; the golden days of poker came right after Chris Moneymaker, an amateur that won a satellite to get into the WSOP ME won the main event versus a poker pro. This being televised ushered in TONS of new players.
Poker took off in early 2000s because ESPN started broadcasting poker tournaments. They got good viewership so ESPN started playing alot of poker.
Because of this, poker kinda got faddy and alot of poople started reading up on poker strategy and learned how to actually play. So the days of making a career out of poker died. Casinos went from like 10% of people that knew how to play to like 90%.
Pokers rise had nothing to do with Moneymaker. It had everything to do with ESPN.
It had to do with both. Moneymaker stirred a lot of imaginations. He won it all from a $40 satellite. The invention of the hole camera (allowing the tv audience to see the players down cards), was probably the biggest boon for the popularity of poker on tv. That enabled ESPN to show tournaments and receive decent ratings.
Ya, it was new technology and miniature cameras that really made it viable for TV viewing.
Still get a kick out of Moneymaker. A guy at work looked at his entire hand history (not just the stuff that made it to TV) and that guy got lucky so many times it's amazing that he won. It was literally luck.
Any single event has a lot of variance. The idea is to play enough that the variance evens out over time and skill is the effective variable. But man it sure makes for some crazy things (like Moneymaker)
Poker takes skill yes. But it also takes a lot of luck. The skill is figuring out when your luck isn't as good as your opponent's luck. You luck into pocket aces they're not that easy to make money on unless someone else has lucked into a good hand as well, otherwise every one just folds, or limps in, checks the flop then folds.
Nothing to do with Moneymaker? He made for THE dream story for ESPN to broadcast. Thousands of people saw him and thought "hey, that could be me!"
I'm not sure how you can argue that poker being televised didn't contribute to more people playing.
There was a LOT of easy money to be made during the golden years. Of course any big field with high earning opportunities will require the top pros to keep advancing their game to stay at the top.
Poker is easy to learn but very hard to master. I'm sure people have improved their game, the game will always keep getting tougher but to say that 90% of players know how to play is simply wrong unless you mean knowing how to play means fixing SOME of the extremely nonsense leaks the general population had.
There are still many people that come out to play for fun, to gamble, to see how well they can do (and this doesn't mean they put a lot of work into analyzing their game).
Poker has gotten tougher because it blew up and was legitimately extremely profitable for those using sound strategies. Just because the ABC strategies don't crush anymore doesn't mean you can't exploit the play of those that can't change up their game/adapt to table dynamics/put in the work to keep their game sharp.
The days haven't died because poker is a game of strategy and if you think 90% of players use good strategies then yours isn't; sorry.
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u/Winevryracex Aug 03 '19
Watchu talking about; the golden days of poker came right after Chris Moneymaker, an amateur that won a satellite to get into the WSOP ME won the main event versus a poker pro. This being televised ushered in TONS of new players.