Top Poker Rooms

Bonus :$500 Bonus :$600 Bonus :$600

Poker Room Reviews

Poker News

Changing Game?

If you listen carefully to many professionals speaking about the changes in poker, you hear them saying over and over that the game is changing and getting tougher. You can almost hear people blaming instructional sites and the proliferation of reading materials for creating a new poker environment without so many “fish” in the water. This situation is not new by any means and people who depend on poker for their income should not panic thinking that a new cohort of expert players quickly forms across the globe. The truce is that amount of experts in any given discipline is always small and they are never in any danger of loosing their income. What could happen that people who consider themselves advanced in poker actually need to improve their game in order to cope with new reality or face declining revenue from the game.

Something very similar happened many years ago with Contract Bridge, once a very popular American card game which is now facing steady decline in participation. In the forties and fifties of last century only a small group of experts of the game had the ability to make very advance moves and they worked hard to develop new tools and ideas. When the game started to gain popularity and the number of bridge publications exploded, some of the expert ideas started to become mainstream standards. Now it looks strange that some of the concepts and techniques belonged exclusively to a very small group of players. So the level of bridge went significantly up. Does that mean that amount of experts increased and they have a hard time winning tournaments? Yes and no. It is absolutely certain that a number of experts is larger now but percentage wise it is probably the same or close to it. And they still play way better then an average player and they still win a majority of the masterpoints.

So proliferation of poker materials, abundance of training sites and presence of analytical software created different poker reality and make some previously advance concepts of the game widely available for anybody who cares. But how many people actually care? The key question here is not “Do you know what is the right play with this hand against this particular people in present circumstances?”. The key question is “Do you want to play correctly for a long time if it is boring and requires a huge amount of discipline?”. And yes it is Friday night, you are 21 years old, you waited an hour to get a sit and already had 2 beers. Most of the time the answer is obvious. Many people have boring jobs and generally uneventful life. When they come to a casino to play poker they don’t want more of the same. They want to play and have fun. And this is a guarantee for a skillful professional that in this new environment he will still see a lot of good old things.