zoob games

I remember when I first started playing Online Texas Holdem poker, limit holdem was so full of bad players that pickings could be got as high as $30-$60. Life was good when I first started playing back in 2002. Limit holdem was the first game to suffer and through 2002-2007 then the average pot sizes shrunk dramatically. This led to many players who were beating the game for substantial sums of money really struggling from 2006 onwards. The arrival of a whole new breed of player led to the games essentially becoming solved and high stakes limit holdem games are very rare now. However with the arrival of the Internet and televised poker then the game is as popular as ever but so popular that a whole new stream of super kids are coming into the game with sophisticated software, good educational programs behind them, big bankrolls and no fear. They are going into areas like Nash solutions and game theory and they have taken poker on to a whole new level. Limit holdem was basically as a solved game by around 2008 and certainly at the higher levels of play. So many limit players and players who were doing well at that form of poker including myself then switched to no-limit holdem in around 2008. But this game too has really taken a hit at the higher levels with many top players now playing this game very well. In 2009 then many no-limit players were switching to PLO as their main game of choice and on some of the big games online then it is PLO and not NLHE that is the main game and the game of choice for many of the worlds leading players now. The sheer popularity of holdem has led to an interesting situation in online poker where the games have large volume at the lower levels but you do not have to go that high to find levels that are pretty screwed down. The same has happened now with SNGs where that form of holdem has also become very tough to beat for significant amounts of money. I can well see a time coming where high-stakes games at all forms of holdem are a complete rarity unless some rich value drops in from time to time. However though there will always be a flood of people coming into poker so the end is not in sight just yet. If you think about this for a minute then the process is a constant one of people being born, leaving school, getting jobs, income, credit cards, computers and a certain percentage of those people will come into online poker. These people will start at the bottom end and this is where there will always be money to be made at the lower levels and probably all the way up to NL100. So for me then the future of NLHE is good if your goals are set lower and you have no big plans of making a million a year.