[Bond18]

Having started the thread I guess its my turn to give my full thoughts on the matter.

First of all I have difficulty believing there will never be a U.S. based online gaming industry. Casino owners aren’t stupid, they see the enormous profit potential online poker and gambling holds and I think with enough lobbying and time we will eventually see U.S. based poker site that will be legal and easy for all to play on. To me, it just seems like there’s to much money NOT to take advantage of the situation . This however, is probably years away given the current trend.

As far as land based events go, and pokers popularity in the culture, I really don’t think people should worry for a number of reasons.

1. Poker’s the only game in the world where anyone can play in the biggest and most important game. How many of us here have dreamed about playing in the superbowl/world series of baseball/nba championships etc etc. Everyone in their lifetime, would probably like a chance to compete at the highest level of something, and outside poker I don’t know what other chance you, I, or anyone is going to have at that sort of “fantasy”.
2. The game has enormous appeal to the young. How many people at 14-18 didn’t necessarily have all that much to do on a Friday/Saturday night? The games social, competitive, and anyone can play so there should pretty much always be a new group of young players picking up the game.
3. Live events are springing up everywhere. Pretty much any state with a casino now has its own poker series of some kind, probably numerous.


People have mentioned the growing international markets, specifically Europe and Asia. I can’t say much for Europe, obviously an expanding EPT is a very good sign, but I can talk about poker In Asia from experience.

The game is CLEARLY growing there as more and more live events have popped up that havn’t really hit the US players radar yet.

There was a Pan-Asian event hosted by TonyGpoker in Manilla, an Asian Poker Tour event hosted by Betfair in Singapore, and there is an upcoming Asian poker classic in Goa India. I attended the Singapore event, and although online poker is currently illegal in Singapore perhaps 25% of the main event field was in fact local.

That a country like India is getting involved is another good sign, bear in mind that India/China/Japan/Korea/South East Asia holds about half the worlds population, many of which where gambling is already highly popular in the culture but poker has yet to really take hold as the next popular game.

Macau (an island off the coast of China that China reprocessed in 1999 from the Portugease) is the fastest growing gambling center in the world with many of the large Las Vegas developers sinking money into construction of world class casinos. Its only a matter of time before these casinos all get poker rooms and the game takes off, though Chinas strict internet censorship could be an issue in the future. For example here in China I can’t access Wikipedia, and anyone found involved with attempting to start their own online gambling site is given enormous prison terms.

Personally, I don’t think the sky has fallen quite yet, and for the time being its certainly lower. However, I think in the future its very possible that we’ll look back at this stage in the industry and think “[censored], we got all worked up over nothing.”

Here’s hoping.