It would be an exaggeration to say that the ups and downs of the world of online poker mirror that of the current stock market. However, it is clear that after an initial meteoric rise a few years ago, the phenomena of online poker has had a difficult couple of years and an uncertain future. This difficulty has arisen because of the passing of an anti-online wagering bill on July 12, 2006 in the House of Representatives in the USA. Whilst this Bill was not a direct anti-online poker law, its greatest target was the community of online poker players by virtue of the fact that it made it illegal to use electronic transfers to online poker sites in the USA. Several online poker sites were affected significantly, especially Party Poker. The drop in prize money in the WSOP Main Event from $12 million in 2006 to $8 million in 2007 was mostly due to this Bill. in summary, the poker boom was dealt a huge blow, and this combined with several cheating scandals, resulted in many people thinking that online poker had a short lifespan.
This doubt has continued over the last 2 years, however in September 2008 (last month) something seems to have happened. I am not sure whether this is a sudden change, or whether it has happened gradually in the background, but there seem to be several good signs:
1. The action in the high stakes online games, especially on Fulltilt Poker, was crazy in September. This is a screen grab from the website High Stakes DB, that summarises the biggest pots ever as recorded by that site. As you see, 9 of the 10 biggest pots occurred in September with the biggest ever pot being $609, 730.
2. Both Fulltilt and Pokerstars have been holding online poker tournaments for a few years now. However, recently they have been getting bigger and bigger. The recent World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) on Pokerstars takes the cake. There were 33 Events including a $25,500 Heads Up tournament, a $10,300 HORSE event and the Main Event in which there were 2185 players and a prize pool of $10,925,000.00. The first place prize of over $1.7 million is bigger than most WPT events (although due to dealmaking, the eventual winner, ckingusc, took away $1,265,432.23. The thought that you can sit at home, clicking away for hours on end, and winning well over a million dollars is mind-boggling to me. Sixteen players won more than half a million dollars over the series. There are interesting stats about the series here.
3. This is more subjective, but on the site that I play (Pokerstars) there appears to be significantly larger number of players, even compared to a few months ago. I remember at the end of last year, the most I saw at the times I play were about 110,000 (which is still a lot!). However now, it can get up to 150,000 on weekends.
So, I think Online Poker is here to stay.
