Week In Review #36 November 24th-30th
Will there be another Poker Boom?
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Earlier this week (well, technically based on how I date the Week in Review posts, at the end of the last week, but I digress), EPT Berlin 2011 champion Ben “NeverScaredB” Wilinofsky tweeted a thread about that began “The poker boom is not coming back.”. I would recommend reading the whole thread, but in case you don’t, I am going to quote some key parts and synthesize his thesis.
The poker boom is not coming back. It was fueled by a dream that has been killed and dissected, deliberately. That an everyman had a puncher’s chance to get in the ring with the “best in the world” and emerge triumphant and rich.
But the lifeblood of poker was and is people who want to gamble. People who want to play a fun game and not take it so fucking seriously. There is no poker product for those people. When was the last time you made it thirty minutes through a broadcast without technical analysis?
But a bigger part of the problem is that NL is just a monumentally different game than it was during the boom. It IS boring and technical now. Go back and watch Jerry Yang win $10 million stacking a pro who flatted 4x from the SB with 85s. Not one word uttered about ICM.
The gist of Ben’s argument is that NLHE has become a dry, technical game, all the best players are robots, and the attempts to brand poker as a mind sport has ended up attracting nerds instead of degenerates.1
Before I begin my own thesis about the poker boom, I feel the need to respond to some things Ben said in his essay that I think are incorrect. Ben says there are no more Moneymaker stories, and while the last outright amateur to win the Main Event was Qui Nguyen in 2016— watching him run over poker pro Gordan Vayo heads-up was an especially gratifying result— since Qui’s victory2, there have been a variety of runner-ups who were “Moneymaker stories” in their own right, such as George Holmes, Steven Jones, John Wasnock and Jordan Griff. Anyone who has played a lot of heads up sit and gos will tell you that any opponent with a pulse has a puncher’s chance of beating a pro, and I think it’s much more likely we are in a stretch of amateurs running bad heads-up than a series of pros who have never been HU specialists, playing so well that they can’t lose vs. an amateur.
Ben also said no one uttered a word about ICM when Jerry Yang won the Main Event. The year before Yang won, I remember Paul Wasicka folding an open-ended straight flush draw three handed vs. Jamie Gold and Michael Binger, and all I remember on Two Plus Two was that everyone was talking about the ICM of the hand3. ICM is old enough to play the WSOPME. It has been in the ether and discussed aloud at live poker tables for basically as long as I have been playing live poker. Finally, Ben compares poker’s popularity to Survivor, without entirely rehashing the argument I laid out in a previous Week in Review about poker’s Queen’s Gambit. It is ridiculous to compare poker’s popularity to the most popular and successful reality competition show ever. Do you know what reality TV show casts everyday people that an audience can relate to, which allows them to fantasize about winning millions of dollars? Every single one. I do not know all the reasons Survivor is a massive hit, but it is not simply because the characters are relatable.
I think in many ways we are in the midst of a second poker boom, but I do not think there will be another poker gold rush. Poker is popular, there was a just a $10k freezeout in Taipei with 671 entries, but I do not think it will capture the pop cultural imagination or receive the amount of investor capital it did during the first boom. The reason for this is because every boom is unlikely; for every Pickleball, there are a million Jai Alais. Poker already had its boom that coincided with Chris Moneymaker, but more importantly with the birth of online poker. In spite of that, tournament poker is very healthy in a lot of ways, and even accounting for tournaments shifting from being freezeouts to allowing unlimited re-entries, events all over the world are still attracting large numbers of players.
What has killed the poker dream is that it is a lot harder to make money playing poker. There are several reasons for this: Poker sites have consistently raised the rake, especially at microstakes and especially when you account for things like rolling back rakeback, loyalty programs, promotions, and deposit bonuses. When I came up in poker, the easiest way to build a bankroll was to take advantage of all the deposit bonuses available. In 2006, Mansion Poker allowed users to bet $1000 on the Pittsburgh Steelers vs. the Miami Dolphins in the NFL season opener, and if you lost the bet, they would give you 100% of your losses back. Joey Porter’s pick-six allowed hundreds of people to build a bankroll for $10+1 SnGs. Nowadays you’d be playing $9+1 SnGs and no Joey Porter Jr. fourth quarter magic is boosting your bankroll. If you continued to climb up in stakes, you’d regularly be playing the $109 rebuy, which was often, at maximum, a 3% rake tournament.4 Nowadays that tournament, like every tournament, would be a re-entry tournament where every entry is raked, that leaves registration open too long, and a larger percentage of entries in the field would be from winning poker players. Structural changes5 like this have done more to kill the dream than people getting too good at poker.
Games with higher rake are harder to beat, as are games that aren’t subsidized by operators offering lucrative promotions to attract new customers. Solvers have made the games harder, but I disagree with the way this development is normally presented. The argument commonly laid out is that pros studied so hard and got so good that they perfected extracting money from whales. I think the actual truth is more that solver tricks and study tools have trickled down throughout the poker community to the point that the worst high-volume poker players have gotten much, much better. If you’re playing in a tough five-handed game where you’re a 2bb/100 loser and a VIP who is losing 40bb/100 enters the game, you will become a 6bb/100 winner. If that VIP adapts to the game condition or watches a couple training videos or clicks around on GTO Wizard and becomes not completely hopeless and gets his loss rate down to, say 20bb/100, you will be a 2bb/100 winner. And then you learn the rake has increased 10% as your rakeback has also decreased.
The other thing that has killed winrates is not solvers per se, but the professionalization of stables. I was never backed by the Eric “Sheets” Haber and Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy stable, so I am speculating here, but I do not believe they had mindset coaches on call. I am not even sure if they made their horses sign contracts. The current top stables probably have HR departments and marketing budgets. This is unfortunately the way of the world. If people see there is free money to be had, whether it’s creating bots to beat microstakes or finding 40 Belarusian teens who will play every day to grind out $50k/year, half of which goes to the backers who can make $1 million a year (before expenses like the aforementioned mindset coaches), it will happen. Stable runners have industrialized micro-stakes poker, while operators have lowered winrates by increasing rake, and fish have gotten better, all of which has made upward mobility in poker much harder. These factors have done more to kill the poker dream than the fact that this generation of poker doesn’t have characters as thrilling as Howard Lederer.
The problem with presenting poker as a mind sport is, in sport, you normally want to see best vs. best, and there is so much variance in poker that it can be hard for even a sophisticated viewer to notice who the better player is. If you showed a Denver Nuggets game to someone who has never watched a basketball game, they would pretty quickly notice that Nikola Jokic is the best player on the floor. If you showed footage of me playing heads up PLO vs. Lazlo Bujtas to someone who is a pretty good PLO player, they might be 55% to identify Lazlo as the superior player. The reason why poker is popular is still, despite Ben’s claims that the dream is dead, that on any given day, anyone can win. Look at the photo gallery of winners at any given Triton stop— you will see a mix of the best players in the world, some okay pros, and some total amateurs. The poker boom is probably not coming back, but the reason is not because certain top pros have gotten so good or that it’s no longer fun to play poker or that too many poker players aren’t gamblers. It is because the poker industry (stables included) have gotten much better at extracting money from the game, and VIPs have improved in such a way that there is a lot less money to go around.
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded:
4 PIO sims looking at different boards and preflop ranges for POTD #176
An HRC sim and a PIO sim for POTD #177
Two Rocket Solver sims for POTD #178
Two PIO sims looking at different cbet strategies for POTD #179
Three HRC sims. One for hand 1 and a FGS and MH sim for hand 2 POTD #180
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Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #180 where I wrote about minraising off 2.7bbs.
POTD #180 onemorething
“Q8o is the bottom-of-range stack-off and it makes around $200 by raising.” Pedantic readers might notice that I said “raising” instead of “shoving”. This is because this is one of the spots where minraising to 50k of my remaining 67k is better than shoving. The reasons this is a good spot to do this are: putting in 75% of your stack and folding to multiway action is not ideal, but it’s not remotely similar to say putting in 99% of your stack and folding. Calling all-in is making a lot of chips, but it is not making so many chips that I can’t fold with a bad hand. Also “my bad hand” here is not like K9s, my bad hands here are hands like Q7o that do not have a lot of equity multiway vs tight ranges. I never fold unless there is an all-in and call behind which means there is limited incentive for a big stack to try to shove wide to get me to make big folds so they can capture a lot of cEV. I am not accidentally creating a situation that could cost me a ton of EV.
Obviously every spot is a little different, but this is a good check list for when to fold with crumbs behind. I am putting in a large amount of my stack, but a small enough amount where I can fold without sacrificing too much cEV when I have a bad hand. My hand has very bad equity multiways, especially when up against tight ranges. I am not playing such a fold-heavy strategy that I encourage people to rebluff me to get me to fold my final chip and last, but not least, when I fold I will have less than 1bb when so I avoid posting 1BB dead as an ante the next hand. So by folding I play at a much higher bb/100 from the BB than if I called all-in and survived.
Housekeeping
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Media
Run It Once uploaded part two of my WSOP Main Event series, this one is titled Pot Odds Matter. I wrote about this last week, but a lot of my content is about how to play versus every good poker players. This series dives into what I feel are the best exploits given the metagame of most large field online MTTs. It is well worth your time.
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Bluesky
As someone who has been around poker for a very long time, the idea that nerds and degenerates are a separate category of people with no overlap is ridiculous. To pick a very famous example: Sam Bankman-Fried.
You can thank me for not saying win.
Yes, 2p2 was an insular part of the poker world, but the discussion was being had. When interviewed by ESPN, Wasicka did not explicitly mention ICM, but he refers to the general concepts underpinning tournament strategy in the interview.
“In a tournament, you’re not going to always do the exact math play.”
$109 BI plus one $100 rebuy to get a double stack plus one $100 add-on to get more than a triple stack for a total of $309.
Of course the biggest structural change were regulatory changes, which are beyond the scope of this essay and might be something I write about at a later date. The biggest macro change was that crypto boomed, which infused a lot of cash into the poker economy.