Does Poker Keep Getting Harder and Harder?
Recently a few players took issue with something I said in a recent interview. The controversial question and answer are:
Bernard Chapin: Do you think that with each passing year, the game gets tougher and tougher due to poker players sharing all their secrets with readers?
Ed Miller: No. My sense is not that the games do not get harder and harder. What the instructional stuff does is keep the marginal players interested. Without the instructional literature, they’d be more likely to simply give up. You have to remember that not everyone learns how to play well by studying. Often, they’ll try to apply proven concepts and then fail miserably. That is what keeps the games good.
The responses went along the lines of, “Of course the games are getting harder. Ed doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” I figured I’d write a little more about it.
First things first. Clearly online games have gotten tougher over the last couple of years, especially the limit games. Guys that made $100k or more playing limit in 2004 can’t come anywhere near that number now. Virtually all the guys I know who played limit online for a living have now moved to no limit games, even though they play limit better. Home is where the money is, and they’re making more playing no limit, a game they play ok, against bad players than playing limit, a game they play great, against other great players.
My feeling is that live games have gotten no tougher overall over that time. In fact, the games I’ve played have actually gotten softer. At least that’s my feeling. The small, live no limit games are laughably soft. The limit games are soft too, at least when you can find them. Many of the people I know who played $15-$30 and $20-$40 a few years ago are now winning at $100-$200. That’s not what happens when the games are getting tougher.
I think the online toughening phenomenon has very little to do with instructional books. As awesome as I think my books are, I think they have only a small influence over the way people play. And I do think that books help keep people interested in the game. So maybe my books have made the books slightly tougher, but it’s only slight.
I think it’s telling that online games have changed far more than live games. I think there are a few reasons:
1. The player base is maturing, fast. Everything happens faster online. Winning players win faster. Losing players lose faster. Time gets compressed. In 2004, new players with fresh money flocked to online games. But that process has slowed, at least on a percentage growth basis, and the maturing of the player base necessarily means the games will get tougher. Many players will get better or quit. Not many players will play regularly online for years and years never improving. They’ll lose too much money too fast. The same process will happen in live games too, but it will happen much slower.
2. Players left limit for no limit. That’s going to make the limit games a lot tougher. It was the more mature game in 2004, so already people had learned to play fairly well. But there were tons of bad players, so the games were good. But bad players migrated to no limit and left the old pros to play amongst each other. Players who were used to winning a lot became break-even or worse. (If you doubt it, read the forums and read all the threads with all the graphs from frustrated ex-pros.)
3. Rakes have increased. Whenever the rake goes up, it squeezes everyone a bit more, and a tier of players who could marginally afford to play will no longer be able to afford it. When you shear off the bottom, the games get tougher.
4. Multitablers have gotten much more efficient. A few weeks back I wrote about the threat that bots pose to online poker. Multitablers are like mini-bots, and they have gotten much more efficient in the past few years thanks to some new tools. PokerTracker, PAHUD, and other tools make it easier to play well on more tables simultaneously. In 2003, most people I knew two- and three-tabled. Now a fair number of people 12-table. It makes a big difference. Just as rampant bots will make the games dead, rampant multitablers make the games tougher.
So yes, online games have been getting tougher over the past couple of years, but I don’t think it’s because “poker” is getting tougher, and I certainly don’t think it’s because I wrote a couple books with some strategy tips. To be honest, I think live games will always and forever be good. There’s too many people who like to play, and too many who are perfectly happy to play badly to make live games tough.
Certain games might get tough. The $30-$60 limit game at the Bellagio might get bad, but another game will spring up in it’s place that’s good. If you play live poker, I think you’ll always somewhere somehow be able to find games good enough to make a living in.
Online games are another story. I don’t see the processes I’ve mentioned above abating any time soon. The games will continue to mature, and multitabling (and botting) will become more efficient unless the cardrooms really try to stop it. Online games may well get tougher and tougher until few people want to play online anymore.
Or they may not. Maybe cardrooms will help reverse some of these processes that make games tougher, and online poker will mature gracefully. Maybe I’m wrong about the whole thing. But I see online poker as far more volatile than live poker. A few years ago it was a professional’s dream, and people who didn’t even play very well could make $200k or more in limit hold ‘em games. A few years from now, it might be a wasteland of high rakes, rocks, and multi-tablers. Live play is more predictable. If you move to LA, I think you can pretty much count on good poker games in the LA area for decades to come. I have no idea what online play will look like in even three years.
Finally, I wanted to talk about the role instructional books have. I’m a bit of an idealist. I think information should be free (free as in freedom, not free beer). It’s not a popular view among many poker players. They want to hide information, keep it from others. “Don’t educate the fishes,” they say.
I think that’s bull####. In cryptography, there’s a fundamental idea: “There’s no security in obscurity.” That is, you can’t make something secure merely by hiding it. Real security means that your cryptographic algorithm must still be secure even if you tell everyone exactly how it works. I feel the same idea applies to poker. You can’t make yourself a good player merely by denying education to your opponents. Good play means taking the fundamental ideas everyone can know and applying them better on a case by case and hand by hand basis.
So I write about what I know about poker. I don’t “hold back,” so to speak. I don’t know everything, and I still learn new things about poker all the time, but I don’t hold back what I know. I think it’s futile. If I don’t say it, someone else will, and ultimately, that’s what people do. They share information. So I share what I know and what I’ve figured out.
And no matter how widely information gets disseminated, there will always be good players and bad players. Some people will use the information well, and others won’t, either because they don’t understand or because they are action junkies and don’t care to play “well.” No book I (or anyone else) could ever write could possible make poker games “bad.” Human nature makes poker games good.
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