Selling poker wrong
I always laugh when the chattering class of poker talks about “growing the game.” It’s a barely-concealed euphemism for getting more dumb money into the ecosystem. Public poker is a negative-sum game, so anyone trying to make a living off of it essentially depends on a constant influx on new recreational players in the sub-ecosystem of the stakes they play.
And so there’s a tremendous effort to glamorize it to the rich and sell dreams of easy living to the middle class. And once you see that, the entire poker industrial complex of operators, media, and celebrity pros looks modestly pathetic when they talk about the beauty of the game and the intrinsic joy of the strategic competition. I mean, poker is beautiful and there is an intrinsic joy to it, but it’s also always been a hustle and 95% of its chattering class are in it almost exclusively for the latter.
The rise of the poker celebrity is a fundamentally modern development. There were well-known poker players in the 80s and 90s—Amarillo Slim and Doyle Brunson were recognizable, if not household, names—but there was basically no point to poker celebrity. As Jessie May wrote (presciently) in Shut Up and Deal (1998), “there’s still ain’t no corporate sponsorship for the top guys. At least not yet.” Andy Bellin wrote in Poker Nation (2003) about just how hard it was to even get an interview with the best players. They just had no use for media, and advertising your skill was, if anything, a negative. The small professional world was still The Color of Money, where the hustle meant undervaluing your skill. Fast forward to today, and the hustle is at least one part selling your skill. For some, it’s the entire hustle.
I remember Pauly (from Tao of Poker) writing as far back as 2010 about how poker media had become an "industry of cool" in the Almost Famous sense, and that seems to have accelerated as of late. WSOP Paradise seems to have drawn a lot of complaints on these lines, and the actual summer WSOP in Vegas seems to be stalling out from its post-pandemic resurgence, in part because Vegas seems to be stalling out but also because there seems to be a growing senes of the naked hustle of it all.
Underlying all of this is another dynamic: poker culture became the culture of the poker chattering class. Which simply wasn’t true in the 90s. If you asked people about poker in the 90s, they inevitably told you about their home game. Thursday night in the basement. Beer and Follow the Queen. Now they probably tell you about celebrity professional poker. No one watched poker on TV in the 90s, and almost no one played in public card rooms. And certainly no one played online, alone.
This has been bad on a number of fronts. First, it has oriented too much of poker around the hustle. Old school home games actually were played first and foremost for fun, with the money largely secondary. Online poker weakened that—even low stakes recreational games online orient you toward the hustle and the money rather than the camaraderie and the fun—and many regular home games now have lost the proper balance between the two. No Limit Hold’em is also to blame—the game is almost totally unsuitable for a fun-first home game.
But as it impacts the chattering class, it has created a monster that is going to eventually eat the beast. The typical recreational player going to play some public poker—at the local casino or at the WSOP—is now much more oriented toward the hustle than they used to be, a kid thoroughly form the world of crypto and sports betting and bottom-line thinking. Some of this is about more than poker—the EV revolution of the past years and the gamification of Zoomer life and the loneliness epidemic and the fall of hanging out and all that—but some of it is the direct product of the “growing of the game” the chattering class engaged in, with training sites and dreams and all that. You can’t grow the game by brining in exclusively people who want to grow the game.
The weird thing is I’ve seen this all before with Bridge, which has been in the throes of an existential crisis for decades now, and is reaching the point where the game may actually die. Bridge was an absurdly popular game from 1930 until roughly 1980–probably more popular for several sustained stretches than poker ever was in 2005. And during the bridge craze, 99% of players never set foot in a duplicate bridge club or played for money. It’s just an incredibly fun game to play, in your basement, with your buddies. While you drink some cocktails and relax.
But the chattering class of bridge comes almost exclusively from the duplicate club world. And to this day, all they talk about is getting more people into the clubs and getting kids playing duplicate. They are totally disdainful of rubber bridge home games. And they are desperate to bring people into the game, but it seems totally backwards to me because you just aren’t going to get a lot of people in the bridge clubs until there are a lot of people playing bridge in their basement, and there is simply never going to be a lot of people playing duplicate bridge in their basement because there never were a lot of people doing that, even in the late 1940s.
None of this is the fault per se of the chattering classes—bridge or poker—and certainly not the individual members of those groups. Some of this is a collective action problem across time and space—people want to make their money now, and if you don’t sell a training site or max out the profits as an operator, someone else will. And some of it is the inevitability of a mature industry and a game getting tougher to beat. But if anyone truly cares about the long-term health of poker—and maybe no one actually does—it is going to require promoting the things about the game that are genuinely fun. We know that many recreational players enjoy the game even when they lose. To the degree that’s not addiction or delusion or dreams, it is probably worth asking what it does consist of, and looking toward promoting that.