Just how young (and why) are the top players online?

[jah7_fsu1]

Old people are to busy drawing the last of social security and drinking lemonade to play online. Plus, they think online poker is illegal. Plus, they are having their depends changed.

[Equal]

"2 - young people have more time/energy to devote to the game"

This is IMO #1 by far. You simply dont have any responsibilities compared to a married guy in his 30's with kids and a house, etc.

[iveyleague24]

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Old people are to busy drawing the last of social security and drinking lemonade to play online. Plus, they think online poker is illegal. Plus, they are having their depends changed.

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sir, you speakeht teh troot

[Micturition Man]

Older people who are into poker started off playing live and often have weird prejudices against online poker.

Also the NL boom is a very recent thing, like past 3 three years.

So the 25-28ish y.o. people who got into poker 5+ years ago are more likely to be LHE players.

[Zeestein]

larger emotional bankrolls, probably above all else

[DeuceSeven]

It's very simple. More time = more hands played = experiencing lots of different situations over and over. If I'm 19, live at home with no job and no rent, it's easy to play 8+ hours a day.

So if you figure someone is 5 tabling thats roughly 500 hands/hour x 8 hours times say 5 days. That equals roughly 20k hands per week. If you were to play live NL you might see 30 hands/hour x 8 hours x 5 days = 1200 hands. The guy 5 tabling plays more hands then a live player sees in a week in less then 3 hours.

[cbloom]

I think you all are underestimating how dumb old people are. They wear their pants up to their nipples and drive American cars. The listen to Kenny G and watch Matlock while eating meat loaf. Pretty dumb, AMIRITE?

[diamonddawg]

imo, the younger you are the easier to focus wholly and intently on something (as multitabling successfully basically requires). as you age, focus is more easily fragmented. like how a 5 year old can stare at an ant moving a grain of sand & find it fascinating. for hours.

[Equal]

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like how a 5 year old can stare at an ant moving a grain of sand & find it fascinating. for hours.

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Methinks you havent actually spent much time around a 5 year old.

I do agree with your general point though.

[LA_Price]

The believe the reason is because of the very nature of risk taking. It's good to note that the players you listed at some point all probably took very big risks and succeeded. Not to say they aren't very skilled(as they in fact are) but rather similarly skilled players probably took the same risk and failed.

As people get older it's harder to start over, so they become more risk averse. One example is to look at how a lot older people love limit Omaha/8 and Stud/8(much lower swings). Basically youth was their lucky advantage in risk taking in that going broke was probably not that important for them, as it would have been relatively easy to start over. So basically you are seeing the survivors of risk taking, which a lot of young people probably took and less older people took(also because they didn't embrace or have as much experience with the internet as young people did).