Originally Posted by
verminaard
As someone who recreationally plays in major poker cardrooms I would say the "bust" has reached the live poker world as well, although it is delayed and will never reach the level of the online world because recreational players still like to go to the casino and play live against other recreational players.
Compared to say 6 years ago, there are very few "big" games (100-200 or higher limit, 10-20 or higher NL) running, and all the amateurs (fish) who used to feed the bigger games seem to have moved down in stakes. I think this has to do with there just being too many good young kids waiting around for the "fish."
For the most part, these "fish" are actually successful people who are intelligent, they just choose to play poker at the amateur level. When they show up to play in their old 200-400 game, (or whatever) they can see there are six skinny, pale 20 something year old guys in t shirts, shorts and sandals hanging around waiting for him to sit down, so obviously the fish is going to pass and find some other game to play, be it a private game or a lower stakes game at the casino.
I could be wrong, but I kind of feel like this is just going to get worse and worse, as the fish move down in stakes and the pros have to move down to chase them, and this (along with rake continually increasing) will make live games harder and harder to beat.
If online poker comes back to the US and there is a new mini boom, I think this will be good for mid/high live games in the short term as the internet pros will go back to the online games, but I think even this would be temporary as the games would inevitably dry up again, and we would be back to square 1.