Poker's Popularity

It seems to me that Poker is not as popular as it was last year or the year before. Revenues from online sites are down. The number of entrants in the WSOP main event was down this year. Ratings for poker programming is down this year as well. I am not saying that poker has "jumped the shark", just that it is not as popular.

I see that there are two reasons, one major and one minor. The minor reason is the unpopularity of last year's champ of the WSOP main event Jaime Gold. I have no comment on him one way or the other. The fact is that he did not generate as much excitement in his win as did Hachem, the previous winner.

The main reason is what I call the "Stupidity of Congress". In putting the screws to financial institutions who do business with legitimate online poker sites. This caused Party Poker to drop all their US clients to play money status. And caused Neteller to basically do the same. This cut about 80 to 90 percent of the online players out of the game. If they are not playing online, they cannot win seats to the main event and they tend to forget about poker.

I know I have not played for real money online since Congress passed and the President signed the bill into law. And I have watched far fewer hours of poker on TV since then.

If only I could find a good home game.

Until then, Enjoy the Pokery Goodness!

Poker TV and A Message to Anonymous

Hello, it's me. My new job gives me, among other things, time to catch poker on TV at odd times. In the past few days, I have seen the US Poker Championship, 2004 and the first half of the Chicago stop of the Heartland Poker Tour. In a way I liked the Heartland Poker Tour because there were no big names and the production was relatively low tech. The one thing I did not like about the HPT was the announcers. They were so bad I have a mental block on their names.

Neither came across as extremely knowledgeable. And they were mispronouncing players names and revelling in the fact that they could not pronounce the names. Note to HPT - get some new announcers.



To Anonymous:

I am not sorry I do not put up your comments. Maybe if they were:
a) Coherent
b) Spelled Correctly
c) In some stretch of the imagination, on topic
I might consider allowing them to be posted. Remember, I'm just a simple hillbilly, so alien conspiracy theories are beyond me.

Everyone else: Enjoy the Pokery Goodness