Trump Economy and Poker

SRM, you are crossing the line of attack posts. Cease or get tossed.

If I have to stop posting about ‘the former boss’ to avoid being banned then I guess I will do so

I do want to make it absolutely clear though that I stand by absolutely every last word I said, no lies told, no words refuted other than his benign trolling, good luck good bless mason

Just so you know, I still have the administrative authority to ban you at any time. But I have chosen not to.

Again, it's my opinion that you need mental help. The Brandi story is very sad, and I suspect that you suffer from a form of depression just like she did.

Also, I've always liked to see people become successful and do well in life. I strongly suspect that in your case, given all the hate you show, that's not happening.

Duly noted, baldy

I'm only familiar with poker in La Vegas, but the bottom line is that I think there are more poker cash games being spread here than there were two years ago, but I can't prove this. However, the number of large games seems to be getting smaller. Also, I had dinner with a knowledgeable person a few nights ago and he stated that poker tournament attendance is down in the past year.

With all this being said, poker has grown at a very slow rate. There are, in my opinion, several reasons for this:

1. Higher rakes
2. Higher buy-ins
3. Bomb pots
4. Promotions that actually hurt the games (and do not encourage good games
5. A slowdown in Las Vegas which means less drop-ins

And finally, poker is always slow in La Vegas before the WSOP.

Yes. It's almost like a ton of random stuff besides who is president matters way more to poker and assigning an improved "poker economy" to any president is stone stupid as people have been telling you for decades.

Another obnoxious poster. Some of you need to grow up.

I do agree that the president usually does not have as much to do with the economy as he's often given credit for. But in this case, Trump policies, for lack of a better term, were/are more significant than what we usually see. This will be especially true if interest rates do come down a lot more.

Stock market had its worse year since the 2008 crash under Biden actually.

You need to get off of 2p2 with 60k posts and rambling like this - def mental illness my guy.

I’ve been saying for a long time his posting is disturbing and not healthy. By interacting with him we enable this behavior.

Yeah we all can't have your maturity

Yet you can't actually articulate anything Trump did in his first term or second that really improved the economy. Trump's own inflationary and dedtabilizing policies are why rates aren't lower now. Pretty much any president other than Trump would have been better if you think rates are the issue This is typical of Trump types and explains why support for Trump is so negatively correlated with education levels.

A lot of it has to do with the game not picking up young players as much as before. They're more interested in table games or just gambling on apps.

20 years ago, a large chunk of the player base were guys in their 20s. Now, I can enter a game and I'm still the youngest guy at the table.

Poker definitely seems off the radar for people under 25, but the general poor economic conditions for young people should not be ignored. And Trump's poor low growth high inflation economic policy has a lot to do with that.

Spoken like someone who’s never played Green Valley Ranch

True… I’m still loling how we went from “the overall economy will get better under Trump so poker games are going to get really good” to “well bomb pots are hurting the games” in 15 months without “you guys were completely correct to be skeptical of my thesis” somewhere in the middle. Guess that pretty well sums up the rural logic of most trump supporters.

Being a 25 year old today definitely sucks ass and people that age dont have the disposable income due to over inflated living costs and so forth, but I don't think it's moving the needle in regards to casinos as much as younger people just not getting their kicks playing holdem as they did back in circa 2008-2012 when we were in a recession.

Back in the old NVG OOT days, you had a boat load of people aspiring to be the next durrr living out of their vans and grindhouses and you just don't have as much of that anymore - partly because the game is more solved and people can get their kicks playing emoji crush or pokerbros instead.

There was a thread here around 2010 from a full tilt grinder mentioning 800k jobs added and he still couldn't get hired at McDonalds - which eventually turned into another hand analysis thread.

A lot of young people now who do have a job are still broke, but a lot of them just don't find the game interesting as before.

20 years ago you were inundated with poker on espn, wpt on fox sports, hsp, random other shows like celebrity poker or even 1 off attempts like that shitty 2 months 2 million or that esfandiari/laak show

Today you have next to none of that except niche livestreams with zero mass appeal

Add to that the massive rise in cost of living and it’s not rocket science to understand there is no poker boom coming in even the most generous of circumstances, which makes the mere existence of this thread, especially in the combative way it was created and defended by its OP, nothing less than poker MAGA clickbait

Easy to mock, impossible to defend, existing for little more than *redacted so I don’t get banned*

At least we're getting the WSOP Main Event back on ESPN this year (albeit who even has cable now as opposed to the last time it was on ESPN)

I feel like being an influencer has replaced playing poker as the get rich scheme du jour.

I think you might be a few get-rich quick schemes behind there... NFTs, Cryptocurrency, probably 3 or 4 others that I can't recall....

... in which case, you'll probably see about a year or so of very wealthy people absolutely plundering the financial institutions, followed by inflation conditions that may rival Argentina or Venezuela through some of their worst times in memorable history.

I don't know if you've noticed this -- I'm guessing you haven't, considering it looks like you thought things were going swimmingly in 2019 -- but for the working class, conditions have been cratering for a bit longer than that, and it's certainly not *IMPROVING* this time around with the guy mainly responsible for the chaos adding swinging his metaphorical wang around in the Middle East and threatening Greenland, Canada, the Vatican, and anyone else who rolls their eyes. Economic conditions don't typically do well in unstable environments, and this is about as unstable as anyone could imagine.

I suppose let's add on that the US auto manufacturers have basically stopped making reasonably sized Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles, and drastically reduced their planned output of Electric Vehicles (EV), yet if gas prices remain at mid 00's levels, we're going to see the conditions that lead to the mass development of Hybrid (HV) and EV to begin with and the prevalence of smaller vehicles ... and so I think we're going to see, if this Middle East thing goes on and fuel prices remain significantly elevated for longer than even just a few months, possibly another replay of the auto manufacturers potentially failing, as many customers will no longer be wanting to buy giant SUVs and massive trucks, yet that's the only damn thing they are supplying. I think a large portion of our country's manufacturing fails out if GM and/or Ford fails out, and/or Chrysler returns to Canada or fails out. At the very least, Michigan and much of Ohio effectively disappear economically.

Has the rake changed in places? It's been max $6 everywhere I've played for as long as I can remember, outside of California, I think. I haven't been to Vegas recently

There's nothing to GROW poker -- without good TV coverage, which there isn't anymore, the only thing bringing people in is other people, and I'm not saying to my friends "Hey, let's go to the casino and play poker", poker has returned to being a thing that people don't talk about unless you're already involved in it -- again, because it's not on TV anymore. What little that is on TV isn't anywhere near as good as it once was. If you want to watch poker content now, you have to go and look for it, I'm pretty sure that ESPN and several other channels are not just airing poker games at random times anymore. You don't see poker games on TV at bars anymore.
Of course, that's also changing with the way TV itself is changing -- you only have a captive audience if you are on in places like bars and such, otherwise people will just turn on whatever they actually want to watch these days.

SO, what does need to happen to grow the game at a good rate again? In the US, we need legalization in more places, we need the places where it's legalized and not yet running to get it running, we need every state to get in on the multi-state agreement, we need all the sites running to be in all the multi-state pools, and we need the casinos backing them to try to draw people in. I still don't think that'll have anywhere near the effect that one generation of people got from seeing it *EVERYWHERE* for about 5 years or so, and we'll never recover from Poker Black Friday because those conditions will never return. But if poker sites start sending people to Vegas on ridiculously cheap satellites again, hey, you never know.

We almost definitely need streams of good satellites to online games again. The tiered satellites that could get people into their dreams for $1 or $10, it's like if that stuff existed again, wsop dot com and the other sites would, I think, have a lot more business, even if they are cheap customers. Maybe they just want to serve the whales, though, maybe serving the cheap customers costs them money, I don't know. But serving the cheap customers brings players to the game, and that's what poker needs. Poker needs people with dreams. Hell, 25 years later, I still have dreams, I do hope to actually catch one of my poker dreams before the next 25 years lol

Out here in Detroit, two of the three casinos have closed their poker rooms, and nearly all of the charity poker rooms have closed, and the three charity rooms that I know of that remain, have significantly shrunken. Around about 20 years ago, one of those casinos that no longer has a poker room at all, had 70 cash tables once. Biggest poker area I've seen to date that wasn't WSOP. I only know of one home game left, and it used to run weekly, even twice a week, I think it's down to running monthly now. The professional players (aside from 5/10 uncapped PLO guys) have left the area, I don't know anyone that plays recreationally anymore... 15 years ago, literally everyone I knew was absolutely buried in poker life. Now, no one is. I'd guess many places are similar.

You guys remember when ESPN made a scripted poker drama?

https://www.avclub.com/tilt-one-season-wonders-weirdos-and-wannabes-espn-tv-2005

AV Club

ESPN's Tilt wasn't great TV, but we might not have had Billions without it

Well lets be honest - the reason this country is in big financial trouble is COVID and the amount of money that was printed during that time. They solved a short term problem of people being out of work but created a massive long term problem of the dollar being devalued. Furthermore the capitalism model continues to divide the wealthy from the poor - the middle class is no more. For myself nothing has changed from Obama to Biden to Trump - the President has basically no correlation to your personal success in America.

I feel like you are making this observation approximately a decade too late.