For years now, the word out on the street in the poker industry has been that winning players are heavily responsible for the decreased number of “weekend warriors” finding their way to the game.
Poker operators (especially within the online realm) have employed a number of tactics to curb what they define as “predatory” activity by winning players. These measures include everything from removing specific formats altogether to segmenting player pools — and even arbitrarily closing the accounts of long term winning players.
This article aims to address two questions.
What defines your typical recreational player?, and…
Are winning players primarily responsible for poker’s decreased player fields?
What Makes Casual Poker Players Tick?
If we’re to believe the hype, your everyday “casual” is a person who gets into poker with dreams of becoming a millionaire by hitting some form of jackpot real money score. Fair enough.
However, it’s how these players are perceived that has come into question recently. Do casual poker players stay in the game longer if they are pampered along the way? What do “fun” players consider to be more entertaining, spending the rest of their poker days within a lottery-style rake gimmick or becoming competent players and pursuing The Dream?
If you consider the extensive resources available to poker beginners along with stories winning players share on Joey Ingram’s Poker Life Podcast, the ship has sailed on exceedingly Negative EV opponents. Sure, there are the occasional signups who are completely unfamiliar with the poker platform and real money wagering, but those are exceptions.
The potential growth of poker is likely linked to a market of video game enthusiasts and other computer savvy individuals who are already capable of performing basic calculations with real-life application. The pure “entertainment value” of poker for most of these would-be players simply cannot compare with that of Triple-A video game titles and their multiplayer facet. For them, the reasoning behind remaining in poker would be based on perceived positive expectation rather than any enjoyment of the “experience.”
Which again brings us to online poker’s highly touted lottery-style games. While there is no denying the attraction of binking a huge score in a PokerStars Spin & Go or similar game, how long does the typical recreational player “spin” their wheels in these contests before moving on to real poker (or to some other online activity besides poker)?
The Spin aspect of these mini-tournaments is fun, yet some believe the action that ensues after small multipliers have hit is extremely boring. On top of that, they’re somewhere between impossible and not worth your time to win at.
This fact has not been overlooked by Unibet representative Andrew West, who called lottery-style games “fun, but they’re too high variance for there to be many winners, and I think you need winners for games to have a future.” The Poker Industry PRO interview that West granted has been covered in recent stories by media outlets PokerNews and pokerfuse, among others.
That line of thinking is rare in today’s poker environment, but it brings an important debate to the surface. “Fun” poker players may very well prefer to prioritize improvement over jackpot-seeking once they’ve been exposed to the introductory phase of poker.
And this is where high volume, winning poker players enter the picture.
Have Winning Players Ruined Poker?
Before we get into this, let’s establish that recreational players are going to wave goodbye to poker the moment they’re broke or no longer find value in wagering for real money — regardless of whether that’s at the hands of superior talent or an operator’s rates.
Casual poker players typically find something else to do when they’ve had enough, yet some operators would have you believe that it’s winning players who have taken on the primary role of running off all the marks (if you don’t count major scandals, government restriction, higher rake in low-stakes games, the vilification of anyone who dares cashout more than they deposit, etc).
These poker brands argue that by winning too much too quickly, ridiculing inferior talent and using third-party software, poker pros have dried up the ecosystem and left a landfill of busto carcasses in their wake.
Is that so?
Consuming The Fish
Losing is part of poker. It’s part of any competitive activity actually, and it’s difficult to believe that any aspiring poker fan would not grasp this basic concept before putting any real money at risk.
Fortunately, there is a legitimate path to minimizing loss for these players. It’s called improvement. Resources to do so are not hidden from poker recs. So if an individual doesn’t take the initiative to become informed about what he or she is risking real money on, the end result is predictable.
Now I know the perception we’ve been hand-fed over the years is that losing, low volume poker players are just barely capable of buying-into a game without uncontrollably defecating themselves and need to be treated with kiddie gloves at all times — but I’m not buying it.
Winning at poker may be “bad” for the various “platforms” or “versions” that each established brand markets, but the game itself remains as pure as Go Fish, Hearthstone, or any other card game. You only get these Utopian-esque accusations and finger pointing related to distribution of wealth when real money gets introduced.
That’s why it’s so mind-blowingly tedious to decipher the legitimacy of any operator vs. winning player claims as to what’s “good” for the game. Everyone clings to their own shtick, and will gleefully rip the rug out from under any detractor with grandiose arguments rife with so-called morality based primarily on self interests.
If you’re going to wager real money, there’s a chance you’re going to lose. That reality is shared by winning and losing poker players alike. Poker for real money is a grown person’s game. If you lack the emotional maturity to realize this fact, there are plenty of non-poker platforms (like CS:GO multiplayer action) where you can get your gamble on with 9-year olds and compete for unlockable digital content that is equivalent to real money.
Ridiculing The Fish
Some poker operators (especially those online) would also have us believe that winning players have discouraged their “victims” over time by ridiculing them at the tables via chat. In some strange “Double Standard” scenario, poker search engine darling Phil Hellmuth is apparently exempt from such critique, but otherwise berating players at the table is uncool.
There is of course a Double Standard in this argument as well, since losing poker players are generally excused from such behavior — but of course it shouldn’t take a winning poker player with two brain cells to rub together much time to figure out that shaming weaker opponents is bad for business.
Still, I wonder precisely how all these poker pros supposedly shooed so many fun players away from the game. I mean, what specifically is being referred to?
Do “weekend warriors” bid farewell to the game when a winning players moans about ICM calculations after getting looked up? Or perhaps the rail emphatically types in “7” and the winning player gets there, prompting a fun player to cashout? Do losing players give up upon Rivering a winner and seeing “fu” in the chat box? What is it exactly that winning online poker players do that is so different from the everyday chat fodder losing players see elsewhere?
Again, your typical poker donkey is probably going to hit the road when he or she is broke and has had enough — notwithstanding whether the disposable income was plucked by poker experts or poker sites. Having recs waste away in no-edge games might keep them around for a few hundred tournaments if they manage their money and Showdown Skills right, but they’re still leaving sooner rather than later if there’s nothing to entice them to continue.
Exploiting The Fish
Now comes third-party software, and the fact that many pros have utilized it to gain significant edges in online games for years. Poker sites have encouraged media outlets and players alike to blackball the use of Seating Scripts and other exploitative programs, yet the responsibility of protecting the integrity of those games lies solely on the operator.
Moreover, winning high-volume poker players have already exposed major cheating scandals, donated millions to charity in the name of poker sites, and brought a ton of fortune-seekers to the game. What the f*** else could poker operators possibly require of the community they theoretically serve?
If specific poker operators do not possess the means or competence to protect their fun players from such “parasitic” practices, then shut the virtual doors or accept responsibility for your inferior product rather than passing off the blame to the next most-logical scapegoat.
Oh and by the way, chatbox activity is also the direct responsibility of sites that enable such a feature, so fix that too if the above examples are truly driving away all these recreational players we place on a pedestal.
Selling The Dream
I’ll argue that the best sales pitch to keep online poker depositors engaged in the game is the opportunity of improvement, culminating in long-term positive expectation.
If you exclude PokerStars’ sponsored streamers Jason Somerville and Jaime Staples, the most popular Twitch Poker casters pretty much all promote this line of thinking. JCarver and PokerStaples actually sell The Dream too — only they do so under an official PokerStars banner.
Thousands of poker fans flock to live streaming shows nightly to see their favorite personalities exhibit their prowess, give strategy insight, and promote sister-services such as training sites and coaching packages. And the most popular games broadcast are by far traditional, gimmick-free ring games and tournaments.
So before the poker industry gets Gung Ho on kicking the beasts who gorge themselves on recreational bankrolls, maybe it’s time to consider the possibility that losing players are better off acquiring the necessary tools to defend themselves. That would most definitely be a more effective approach to sticking around than pointing fingers at those who bested them.
That may seem like a tough love take on smoothing things over with depositors while they await their next payday, but no one is lying to them when they say that the resources to increase poker expectation are readily available online.
So the next time you read a hit piece on winning high-volume poker players, ask yourself whether that’s a significant cause for concern in the long run compared to other issues outlined in this article. Poker is a game of skill. And the easiest way to prove that is by having long term winners.