Robbery in the poker world

WSOP main event prize pool when adjusted for inflation has not seen highs since 2006. You’d think the game is getting bigger but it looks like a bubble that’s waiting to pop. As the barrier of entry gets lower the amount of money circulating stagnates.



Meanwhile both online and brick and mortar gaming revenue has seen astronomic rises in just the past four years.

Your local 2/5 game when adjusted for inflation is now closer to a 1/3 game and is much tougher.


The people who run this industry are power hungry greedy individuals who are unchecked and destroying a game I always loved. Numbers will never lie to you.

At minimum the ball has been dropped but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. This industry is by rule run by people who have been conditioned to exploit others (as is the nature of playing cards) and their conditioning carries over to the way they run business. It is not surprising that the numbers reflect this.

Most of the big names siphon money out of the economy and then tell you they are serving you in some way. A common behavioral pattern that happens in high level politics and that I’ve observed in the world of poker.

If you’ve seen the Jared Jaffee tweet he is critical of the poker content creators. Not only do I not think he is right and that the influx of “poker content” is not good. I’m lead to believe they are actually pushing people away from the game. Gambling has more than doubled in size since 2020. It’s projected to be at $1 trillion by 2030 yet these clowns struggle to grab even a speck of dust worth of that. What they ARE good at is exploiting everybody who is already in the game.

I’m appalled to have the foresight to see what is really happening in a game I grew up loving and how greedy these people are. There are tons of ways to grow interest in the most awesome card game in the world but these guys have not tapped into any of them. Somebody explain to me how dropping a new $50 coaching course every other month and 2 minute snippets is a way to grow the game. Draw me a flow chart that demonstrates how it works.

The people who have grabbed hold of the reigns are parasites and cannibals in the truest sense. They fight for pieces of the same pie and leech off the average player as the game slowly dies.The type of people who were once drawn to this game are repelled by the PC fun and loving happy go lucky” we’re all one big happy family” vibe. It’s complete and utter nonsense and I am certain it’s destroying the game. Ofc this is all propagated by the bigger accounts whose bottom lines depends on it.

If nothing is done it’s going to fizzle out.

If I was an 8 figure poker elite all my efforts 24/7/365 would be going towards lobbying for online poker legalization, finding a path to making that happen, not releasing the next coaching course and propping up social media influencers. The aforementioned is the highest ROI thing they can do for long term sustainability and the latter is vacuuming up money from the economy. It is the inverse of improving the game. There is not one thing that they do that is even a remote indication that these people have anything in mind but their opportunistic self interests. Which is not an inherent bad thing it is capitalism. But they peddle it like it’s not what it is. There are parallels here to American politics.