Two Plus Two Newer Archives - The Future of Poker... Dec 2006 onwards

Hi guys: long post, but I'd appreciate it if you would read and respond to it.

edit: Please please answer honestly, I know that we are all biased towards poker continuing to grow/laws being repealed and and the games getting softer or even staying the same, but I want the cold hard facts.

I hope this post is in the right forum - it has to do with the future of poker, which is highly influenced by legislation, so I think it is. If it isn't, hopefully a mod can move it to a forum where it will receive better responses.

My question is this: What is the future of poker as a potential for earnings, say in the next year? What about 2-3 years, or 5 years?

What decides 'potential for earnings' is two things: one, being able to play (legality) and two, difficulty of the games relative to the stakes. I live in Canada, so I'm pretty sure it will be legal to play online for the next 5 years at least (please correct me if I'm wrong on that), but what about the difficulty of the games?

In a year from now, what do you people expect the difficulty of the 1/2 NL games to be, relative to today? What about in 3 years? What about for 2/4 and 3/6?

There are of course many factors that affect the difficulty of the games, but the largest is the amount of people playing - more people, more available money, and the less skilled on average the players will be. I guess the US legislation controls this a lot, so is it likely to be repealed in some way that allows the US casual players to return, and will they? What sort of timetable is reasonable to expect for a repeal of the legislation? Or is poker just a fad in which the casual players and the TV shows will disappear or be greatly reduced (for a lack of interest) in the next few years? This greatly scares me, and if you could explain why you think so or don't think poker is a fad, please respond.

To get down to the reasons I ask this, I'm interested in playing poker as a job (I'm a student, so it would be to pay for tuition/fun stuff, not as a career..yet). This isn't a thread about 'can I do it' or whatever: Let's just assume that today I can beat 1/2NL. And the earnings that I receive from beating this stake at say 5 bb/100 are enough for me -> I'm just worried about the future potential of the game.

Whether or not I can actually beat 1/2 or whatever is irrelevant to this thread -> assume I can. It will take me some effort to get there (because I'm not at that level now), so the entire reason for this post comes up. I'm willing to invest energy/studying into achieving this level, but I just want to make sure that the earnings I receive from it won't recede greatly in the future.

So guys, what do you expect the difficulty of the games (say 1/2 to 3/6) to be be like (compared to today) in a year from now, or 3 years, or 5 years from now?

Thanks a lot, I know it was a long post,
bigbb33