The big $4000-$8000 game in Las Vegas rarely starts these days. Susquehanna's top traders can't make money any more online. (Susquehanna is the gamer's Wall Street firm--they hire backgammon players and actually teach poker as part of their curriculum. A few more months on my own and they'll be my only realistic career option.) Chat boxes online tell the same story. Internet poker as an ATM is dying.
My own experience, with this year off to a record start and a little over ten thousand in the week I've been back, seems more and more like positive semivariance and less and less like a promising career choice.
The root of the problem lies at the bottom of the poker pyramid. The much-loathed UIGEA (Uniform Internet Gambling Enforcement Act) has made it much more difficult for casual players to deposit money online. The smaller stakes games are now filled with poker bots, automated programs with increasingly sophisticated poker strategies, that suck money from the players at the low end of the poker food chain. With a greatly diminshed ability for rank amateurs to get lucky and try their hand at larger games, the supply of easy money in the bigger games is choked off.
It's a vicious cycle. Without fish in the $500-1000 game, those players drop down a level or two to compete with me in the $100-200 and $200-400 games, making them that much tougher.
This process won't happen overnight, but over the course of the next several years. There's going to be an awful lot of 24-year olds applying to Susquehanna after that!
It's been a great ride, a career highlight, and I hope I can extract a half million or so more before it's all over.
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