Is the boom over or just a down turn

[pocketpared]

Boom is over. Same thing happened with pool. The Color Of Money came out and pool halls were flooded for ten years. The kids finally figured out how well you can twirl a cue stick didn't translate into making money at the game and busted out.

[JJT]

Also the same thing happened with...that game with the black & white discs and dice in the portable board/cases. Bars all over the place had tournaments, now the cases are gathering dust in the backs of closets across the country.

But this has also happened to free poker. For this one national organization, in one city in my state they had over 20 bars that had free poker twice a week. Soon that had shaken down to about 8 bars. At this point I believe that the organization has been bought out, it's site has the same name but a totally different POV.

[kayaker]

[ QUOTE ]
Boom is over. I saw something tonight I thought I'd never see - an empty table at 8 pm on a Saturday evening at Bay 101.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't know about the boom being over, but if Bay did the same as Garden City and bumped their rake, it probably just pissed off enough people.

GC went from 1/3 on a 3-100 table with a $4 max rake to 1/2/3 with a $5 rake on any hand not chopped.

Blind stealing is non-existent and even first-in raising from LP is almost gone. Raise PF and it folds around and whee!, you just made $1. Chopping is required if folded to the blinds, even if you have AA. Raise from the blinds and you LOSE money. Thankfully the game at GC is still quite loose.

[Wally S]

A better time to evaluate CAZ will be next month. November is the start of the Snobird season, they drive a lot of the low limit action.

Wally

[mrkilla]

the smaller rooms seem to be drying up with any significant action

but go to the rooms during tournament times, the places are packed. Now you can say "oh ofc its trny time" but it wasn't always like that. FW capped there smaller events at 1k ppl they used to get half that going back before the boom.

In general the TV is still brining 1/2 donks to the tables with there sunglasses but a lot of the old fish are goners

[DrewOnTilt]

[ QUOTE ]
I gotta think the housing crunch and the gas prices are playing a substantial role.

EDIT: As soon as I typed that, I left this thread, and went to the next thread to catch my eye. It turned out to be a post about a mind-boggling floor decision that needlessly cost a player a big chunk of his stack.

Every night, I sit down and open a dozen threads, each detailing floor calls that range from moronic to deranged.

All these rooms, run by all these incompetents, CANNOT BE GOOD FOR BUSINESS. I wonder how many people quit coming because they can't stand this part of it?

I know that I have worked as a dealer in rooms that have made me think, "Boy, I'll never play in this room! You'd have to be nuts to trust this staff to correctly settle any disputes."


[/ QUOTE ]

Poor cardroom management is bad for business for the casino in question, unless it has a monopoly on the local poker games. A few years ago, I swore to never play at the Grand Casino Tunica again. I made a raise from the button, but the floorlady decided to call a string raise on me. It was NOT a string raise, and there was no objection from the dealer or anyone else at the table. The floorlady happened to be standing near me, and called a string raise on me.

I argued like a monster. Everyone else at the table, including the dealer, told the floorlady that there was nothing wrong with my raise. No dice. She wouldn't budge, and I was forced to just call. My aces got cracked by the big blind's 10 4 offsuit.

Dealer mistakes are one thing, but poor floor decisions no doubt have at least SOME long term effect on the game. Imagine a tourist wandering into a cardroom and then finding himself caught up in a situation like the one above. Some might get turned off by it.

[davidlong14]

...downturn 'til 1.20.09

[dukenukem]

Umm, don't see how less rooms can be good. Even a weakly managed bad room 20 miles away is better than a great one 120 miles away.

I play in a well run room in Jasper, FL, because, at 60 miles from UF, it is closest. July and August saw a rush of business there because NL was new to our state, but now business is steadily dropping off. The regs who kept the room going for its first 18 months playing $1-$2 limit don't like the changes. Most of them lost six months of poker money the first few two weeks of NL! Even the ones who stuck to limit, hate the extra buck out of the pot for the jackpot (also made legal as of 7/1). (But when it gets near $20k, they start to drool. These same regs can't see that playing $2-$5 limit at least occasionally makes a pot over $45 and eases the pain of the rake a little. They just keep playing $1-$2 limit. Ugh. Keeping a $2-$5 limit game going here--even on weekends--is nearly impossible.)

Tournaments that last year filled six or seven tables on weekend nights now start with only three tables. Sigh.

Yeah, we had our share of fair-haired boys coming in the first few weeks wearing their Full Tilt shirts and wrap around shades, but they got flayed by a handful of cold-blooded pros. (Hey, Mack, whazup?) Those same pros continue to extract $$ from the dwindling fish. They make money, but they kill the action along with the poker spirit of the folks "trying" NL. No sympathy for the losers, but there just aren't enough players in the region to replace them.

As for kids in high school and college becoming life-long poker players, don't count on it. Something that seems very cool in youth, like comic books, video games, skateboarding, etc., begins, for many, to seem childish as 30 looms. Indulge while in Vegas a couple of times a decade? Sure, but keep playing regularly where the rake chokes the life out of the game? What for? Home games among friends will survive...but friends with wives/husbands and kids will be hard pressed to find the time as the years pass and the bills mount.

The ONLY way to revitalize poker anytime soon is by bringing legal, highly regulated internet play to the USA. Online poker gives many adults the time to learn the subtle beauty of the game in a safe environment, and at a drastically lower cost than they will face in a B&M card room.

Card rooms can't run without the rake, and they can't survive on the same rake they were taking in 1979. But wages aren't keeping up with anything, so how does a new player dare play in a higher-limit, more profitably raked game? By climbing the ladder online. So online can help the B&M eventually. But the same folks who are struggling to afford a combo at McDonald's can't be expected to afford B&M stakes and rakes and tips and jackpots and gas to get there.

In other words, it might be that B&M poker is going to be priced out of reach of most of us working stiffs.

IN the short term, the price of gas is going to hurt all but a few card rooms in America, some fatally. Answer? Now there is a topic for another website, as it involves public transportation and electric cars!

But, as several posters pointed out, booms come in waves, and the tsunami of poker has left the number of players greater than before it washed over America. Poker will get along until the next wave comes, whenever that will be, because it is a GREAT game, and it cannot be killed by corporate greed or moronic politicians.

Footnote: In Florida, if a card room is not run by a tribe, it MUST be associated with a pari-mutuel business. So, to make money on poker, a room has to offer either horses or dogs OR the most easily corrupted gambling game anywhere--jai alai. What a twisted joke. Three little hunchbacked guys wheezing on the court for a few minutes in order to make a card room legal. Oh, what a state!

[davidlong14]

...down turn til 1.20.09

[El_Hombre_Grande]

I think you are seeing a byproduct of an overall weaker economy. The guys called fish are often just recreational players with alot of disposable income. Poker can't be on the top of many of their budgets. Its the first to go when things get even a little tight.

As far as the boom being over, I think it is in terms of just raw exponential market growth. Alot of that has to do with the brilliance of Frist. But I don't think you are going to see it shrink to pre-boom size. I think the gains are pretty much here to stay. I don't think chess, pool, or backgammon ever came close to whats happened to poker. All have had their moments, but there's no comparison to what poker has done in the last 5 years.