Taylor Caby is an owner of www.cardrunners.com, an instructional poker website with many helpful videos.

Everyone by now is sick of hearing about poker’s amazing surge in popularity over the past few years. I don’t have to (or want to) say the names Moneymaker, Raymer, etc. for everyone to know exactly what I’m talking about. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the game that I have loved playing for almost ten years now become both popular and widely accessible enough for me to make a lot of money while still attending college. In the past few months, I have taken some time to reflect on my future after graduation, as well as the future of poker. I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you today on these topics. <READMORE>

Poker has always been something that has been relatively easy for me. I am clearly a LOT better player now than I was when I started, but even when I first started, I almost always had some sort of small edge on my primary competition. I never planned on playing seriously, even though I did joke with my family about becoming a poker pro someday. A lot of people have heard the story that I turned $35 into a large amount of money playing on UB; this is true. I’m extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to make this money, but I’m realistic in that things this “easy” can’t last forever. Now, in no way am I saying doing what I have done has been easy. However, when a college kid can spend only 3-4 hours a day on a hobby, yet still be able to turn $35 into enough money to comfortably play $10,000+ buy-in poker games, take a substantial position in the stock market, and start a retirement fund, it should be considered relatively easy when taken into account the amount of work and time period required to accomplish this feat.

When I first started moving up to the $2-4nl and $5-10nl cash games on UB, I saw play that was similar to that of the play I see now at most $1-2nl games. There were clearly a lot of weak players who were very new to poker and playing above their heads, in terms of both bankroll and skill level. It was common to see players making ridiculous bluffs or calling off all of their chips with only a draw. Now, it really is rare to see this type of stuff at a $5-10nl table online. Yes, it still does happen and there are a lot of weak players, but more often than not, even the worst player at the table is not playing as bad as the worst player at the table played two years ago.

One example of this that I have noticed is that there are very few passive players in the no-limit games. The bad players now may just move all-in when it is obvious they have a drawing hand. This is not usually a good play (it sometimes may be), but it is a stronger play than simply calling bets with just a draw, since it gives the opponent a chance to fold. This is just one example of some tendencies that I have noticed changing in the middle limit games.

What does this mean? Well, in the long run, in poker, the worst players are going to go broke. This simply has to happen, and it has in many cases. This isn’t a bad thing, as long as there are new players to fill their spot. So far, I think the popularity of poker on TV has added enough dead money back into the “poker economy” to make up for some of the worst players leaving the economy. The problem lies when poker becomes less popular and the influx of new players slows down. I see no end in the near future to new players joining the small and middle stakes games. However, the games at the top will continue to get tougher and tougher as the cream rises.

This doesn’t have an impact on players playing at $2-4nl and below. However, it does affect players playing in the biggest games. Eventually the games at the top are going to be filled with many extremely skilled players (and a few players who have been lucky in the short run). This doesn’t mean that there won’t be some players who can still make absurd amounts of money in these games, but many won’t be able to and the ones that do will notice increased variance. To state it another way, in the coming years there are going to be fewer and fewer winning players at the biggest games on the internet, and the players that do win are going to have a much tougher time doing so.

Now, how does this affect my future with poker? First, I’d like to dispel a common myth that I hear. For those of you that don’t know, I started an instructional poker website (www.CardRunners.com) about 6 months ago. People are skeptical (with good reason) about someone selling information that others can use to make money. This practice begs the question, why sell the information if you can make more money keeping it to yourself? This argument is true almost 100% of the time. Let me explain to you why it is not true in my case. I never started CardRunners (CR) to get rich. In fact, if CR is around for 10 more years and I never play poker again, I may never make as much money from it as I have made playing poker. I’d love to get rich off of the business, but it is improbable. However, I do plan on starting and running some more of my own businesses in the future. CR has been somewhat of a test run for me to practice starting my own business. I am thankful that my first business has (so far) been successful, but I have learned something in the process. Even though I have made a lot of money playing poker, I have not fooled myself into thinking that poker will ever make me as rich and or successful as I want to be.

I decided to turn down a lucrative offer in the finance world when I graduate college. This is definitely not the safest choice, but it is one I am comfortable with. I thought about all of my options and think that I will be happier working for myself than for someone else. My point of emphasis in this article is that even though I am sticking with poker as my primary source of income (upon graduation), I am realistic about the long term prospects of playing poker for a living. I think that there will always be a lot of money to be made by the best poker players in the world, but it will never be as easy as it is now. I urge serious poker players, especially young players, to be aware of this fact and to choose carefully before making a career decision involving poker that may be tough to reverse.

For now, I’m going to keep playing as much poker as I can. However, it feels good that I can say the following with confidence: in ten years my greatest financial success will not be attributed to playing the game of poker.
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