20 Years of Poker

I've realised that I have now been playing poker for 20 years! How do you go about recapping twenty years of poker? Well, let's start with some cold hard facts: 

Wins vs Losses:

The blue line is cold harsh money spent on poker versus money back into my bank account. Orange line includes the less tangible value of live packages won.

The graph paints a pretty accurate picture of my poker "career"; after a few losing years, I started studying, got to grips with the game and have been in profit ever since.

After those initial losing years, I was very proud to become a winning player. Year after year, it was a huge source of pride to know I was beating the game but as time moved on, I became frustrated. Was I really beating the game? It didn't feel like it. The angle on that blue line is dissapointmentingly shallow. Introducing bankroll management helped transform me from a losing player to a winning one but I have felt trapped at the lower stakes. I have tried taking shots at bigger games, and satellites to even bigger events, but my ambition has exceeded my ability and I've been forced to return to the low stakes to rebuild my bankroll time and time again. And I've been stuck in that pattern for over a decade. So while being up £10,000 sounds pretty cool, applying some very rough maths shows I've made less than £2 per day in that time, and half that if we just count cash alone, hardly living the dream. I guess it's decent, but not great.

Poker Goals

In my early years of playing I set myself some goals, let's see how they went:

1. Become a Winning Player. A very straightforward goal, which as we can see from above, was successfully achieved. 
2. Play a Big Live Event. I have played three $1k events at PKR Live, the WSOP and Unibet Open. No big scores to report but another goal checked off the list.
3. Get on TV. This one is a bit more... fuzzy. The inspiration for this came after watching UK poker shows, like Late Night Poker and the many similar shows that it seemed to spawn. While there were many big names featured in these shows, there was also lots of just normal people with day jobs who had managed to win a seat, and I planned to be one of them. Did I ever make onto TV? No, not as I intended but also, kind of? Those poker shows don't exist on TV anymore, it is now on either YouTube, PokerGo or Twitch. My virtual self has made it to a featured final table with commentary and the likes on YouTube, as well as being interviewed by Ashely Hames (former late night TV presenter) at PKR Live. Alas, evidence of those have been lost since PKR's demise. More recently I've been battling at the virtual felt on a few different live streams, as the opponent of the likes of Jaime Staples. I never quite made it to TV as I intended, but I'd still say this goal is a partial maybe.
4. Make £20,000. There was a very specific reason I wanted to win £20k, I wanted to quit my job and that was my salary at the time, that money would have given a cushion of safety to quit my job without having anything lined up. That number was further solidified because it was 1st prize for the PKR Masters, PKR's regular big tournament. While winning the Pokerstars Sunday Millions has always seemed out of reach, winning the much smaller Masters seemed at least feasible. Sadly, the Masters title and that £20,000 have been equally elusive. On top of that, £20k would no longer allow me to quit my job, not only has my salary grown since then but so have my responsibilities. I'd need a SUBSTANTIAL amount of money to justify a poker fuelled sabbatical nowadays. This is a fail.

What else has happened over the last 20 years?

World Events

Unfortunately, the biggest event in poker over the last 20 years might well be "Black Friday", when some American politicians decided banning online poker would be a real vote winner, or money earner, I'm not sure which. Not being a USA player, I wasn't directly affected by Black Friday but even so, when the largest player pool in the world just disappears overnight, the effects are widespread. I assumed that draconian law would be phased out in one way or another after the US government made it's point, and presumably cut themselves a chunk of the profits but no, while some progress has been, it's generally still in effect 14 years later. Land of the free eh?

As a result of Black Friday, everything shrunk: player numbers, prizepools, guarantees, promotions and the less attractive poker became, the more the trend continued. Poker sites needed liquidity to keep all those things so there was a lot of consolidation, restructuring, a lot of cost cutting. The global financial crisis wasn't helping matters either with businesses and ordinary people alike having to tighten their belts and spending less. The poker boom was over. 

My favourite poker site PKR went bust in 2017 but in truth it died long before then. I'll keep saying this forever and a day but PKR's unique selling point was not the 3D graphics, that was just the hook to get you in the door, PKR's USP was the community. PKR's own dedicated forum was the hub, backed up by live events, magazines, live streaming, as well as the table interactions we're now seeing rolled out across most sites. It's the only site I've ever played at where people would regularly just chat in the chat box, it wasn't just for wishing ill health on players and their families, it was a genuinely friendly place to play. But all of that was lost in the name of the once mighty dollar, and by the time PKR moved to the MPN network, it was nothing more than a fancy skin.

Pokerstars bought the right to refund players their PKR account money, which I initially thought was odd but I think it done two important things: 

1. Gave Pokerstars some good press after years of the Amaya owners squeezing everything they could from their once loyal player base
2. More importantly in my mind, it quietly swept away any notion of poker player's online account money being at risk. After the Full Tilt Scandal, we players were constantly being reassuranced that our money was "ring fenced" and couldn't be used by the poker sites themselves, and yet, from what I saw unfold with PKR, when a business goes into administration, that money is no longer ring fenced, it's for the administrators to decide what happens with a business's assests and they very well might not put the players first.

Reflection

That paints a very gloomy picture of online poker but despite the many setbacks and scandals over the years, poker is growing once again and my positive experiences over the years well exceed the negatives. Most notably, I won a satellite to play at the WSOP in Las Vegas. My wife and I didn’t have much money at the time and weren't even going to go on holiday that year but next thing we know it's off to Las Vegas for fancy hotels, restaurants, private parties and of course the biggest poker games of my life. It was a truly amazing experience that I simply wouldn't have had otherwise. 

But it's not just the big money events I have valued over the years, but the less talked about smaller misadventures along the way too. PKR not only held official live events but it also inspired a series of unofficial live meet-ups across Europe, some of which are still going today, outlasting PKR itself. One all nighter in a Leeds casino, we inadvertently took over a floor of the casino, drank the bar dry, recruited the staff after their shifts ended and even had an impromptu magic show. Utter nonsense that can't be measured but nonetheless enriched my life with the value of people, shared experiences and community. I've been clinging on to that for some time but I think it's slipped from my grasp. I had thought I had found a new poker home at Unibet, they had quite an active and friendly forum, regular live events, a few streamers, and sponsored The Chip Race podcast, it had that mix of media and interaction that helps build a community and I dived right in, I qualified for the Unibet Open event in Estonia and then... COVID. With the lockdowns etc, live poker dissapeared but online poker went crazy, sites put on a never ending series of big money events and the standard of play was terrible just terrible. I still wonder if that's what it will be like if the USA ever joins in again. But after the COVID restrictions eased, things went back to normal, only Unibet seemed reluctant to return to putting on live events, the podcast partnership ended, the forum was fragmented by a new Discord server and I've lost the feeling once again.

Maybe it still exists somewhere, maybe the high rollers working the EPT circuit have a similar thing, I don't know but that's what I want the most, I miss the community I once belonged to. I still enjoy the game itself, I like learning new games and stategies, I still dream of that elusive big win but it's not the same when it's got no soul. Maybe I'm not in it for the money afterall,  maybe I'm looking for something else.

Since becoming a parent, I have fought to find ways to fit poker into my life but more and more I find myself pondering if it's worth the fight. Is it really the best use of my increasingly rare free time? I don't have the time to play the tournaments I want to play, and after a day at work and an evening of parenting, I don't have the mental bandwidth to study. Realistically, my situation is unlikely to change.

When I started writing this, I had thought it was going to be a fun compilation of stories from across the years but the more I reflect on my time in poker and the value I gain from it, the more I'm questioning if it still provides me with what I want, or need. I don't actually have any goals anymore. I think I'm just playing out of habit. Maybe it's time to stop.