The legendary poker boom
This is the fourth post in a series on the decline of online poker.
You can read the previous post, Cheaters. Everywhere, here.
Less a boom, more a mirage.
Speak to anyone who played in the mid-2000s and there is a good chance
they go a little misty-eyed about the boom years. They invariably have
a theory for how we get back to them. Sometimes it is a change in the
law somewhere, especially in a market like the US. Sometimes it is a
new crossover star minted from the latest poker character (Moneymaker
was a gift to the industry, but often only a poker player could see
stardom in another poker player). Sometimes it is a novel game format,
because they are bored of Hold’em, or a rule tightened or loosened,
usually to their own benefit. None of it is sufficient. Those days are
not coming back, and they were never quite what those people remember.
Poker is old. Extremely old. Hold’em in its modern form has been around
for over half a century, and the game’s roots run a great deal deeper
than that. Longevity like that tells you something about the
fundamentals. It’s easy to pick up yet effectively bottomless. Maths
and strategy, logic and emotion, deception and discipline. It is an
almost peerless game. By the early 2000s you had whole generations who
had been exposed to the game in one form or another, who were now
seeing it on television and increasingly had reliable internet at home.
The laws governing online play were, at the time, either grey or
written for an age when you could only gamble on a riverboat. What
looked like a boom was really just this reservoir of latent players
finding an outlet. For a few years that supply of customers was so deep
that the product sitting on top of it barely mattered.
Open it once
The successful operators learned very quickly how to tap it. I
described that PokerStars machine at a high level in Not neutral. When Stars were planning entry to a new market the playbook was
extremely professional and organised. Find an ambassador who would
resonate with the audience (often a sporting celebrity, occasionally
one whose actual grasp of poker was, let’s say, rather tenuous), pay
them handsomely to be the face of it, agree whatever land-based casino
partnership the local law demanded, corner the television relationships
so your branded content ran late at night, then line the product and
the marketing up behind the launch. Everyone knew their part, and the
company was exceptional at repeating the process, again and again.
But you can only open a market once. You drain that reservoir of
existing, poker-aware people a single time, and after that you are in
the much slower, much more expensive business of capturing, or
creating, the new generation. That is the moment a market starts to
mature. It is also, not coincidentally, the moment the player ecosystem
begins to evolve - the online-native edges get found, the third-party tools I wrote about start to push the skill level up, and the gap between the
committed and the casual begins to widen.
The trouble with a tailwind that strong, and a company effectively
derived from that group of players, is that it never forces you to
think. Mark and Isai deserve enormous credit for the professionalism
they drove when dominating the market - but it did have quite a
homogeneity of outlook. It was a poker company run by poker people -
and as Mark once put it to me, ‘everyone is replaceable’. In the
context of where Stars was, he was largely right. When the current is
carrying you, the voices suggesting contrarian positions tend not to be
heard. The boat is moving and you have the tide behind you, so you row
faster. The hard introspection about the product, the medium-term
trade-offs or who the thing was actually being built for, never got
tackled. The success of the model meant that the structures and
conventions Stars built became the orthodoxy of the entire industry.
Two markets
You could summarise this entire series on the decline of online poker
in a single arc. A handful of operators tapped a once-in-a-lifetime
pool of players, built the product and the rules for the people who looked like the people building them, then a combination of business need and instinct tilted everything
toward the most sophisticated and highest-spending among them. A decade
later the product had stagnated, the skill level was beyond the casual
player and there was a vast, vocal wall of disillusioned former players. I don’t think many who worked in the
industry would argue with the broad thrust of that, but there is a more
accurate reading sitting underneath it.
I believe that there are really two poker markets, and there always
were. People who play primarily for enjoyment or camaraderie, and
people who play primarily for outcome. The line is not quite ‘for money
or not’ - plenty of people play for money and are really there for the
fun of it - but the two groups want fundamentally different things, and
they should mostly not be at the same table. During the boom there were
enough easy games to hide that and the system (sort of) functioned.
There were so many new players arriving that the two could share a
(virtual) felt and everyone got something out of it. As markets matured
that no longer held, and you were left with a product built for outcome
players, and an ecosystem increasingly dominated by them.
This leads somewhere the industry would, or more accurately could, not
go. Real-money poker, the version that built PokerStars into a giant of
online gaming, is structurally a niche product. A brilliant, deep,
endlessly refined product, but a niche one, for a relatively small
group who, on the whole, would rather not have to play each other (even
though they are increasingly being made to anyway). The real-money game
should never have been the mass market product.
A game, not a job
In a sense, this is not just a theory. The market did effectively split
in two, but not in a way that was optimal for the gaming operators. The
enjoyment players drifted to free, “social” products - Zynga Poker and
others like it. The likes of PokerStars, comfortable in the success of
their approach, entirely missed the opportunity of Facebook as a
customer platform, and when they were shut out of markets like the US,
Zynga had the playing field mostly to itself. Interestingly, despite
the freedom they had, those products stayed fairly close to a
traditional poker product in style and format. Zynga Poker customers
sit inside a walled play-money product, aggressively monetised by
in-app purchase offers, while the gaming operators spend money on Meta
ads to target them. From a gaming operator perspective, it’s a curious
standoff. They are paying to target the very same players, as they are
often the multi-vertical customers they want, but ideally they would
bring them into their ecosystem, rather than buy them out of Zynga’s.
The real money poker sites did try this (PokerStars could even have
bought Zynga in the early days), but they pretty much failed in every
attempt to occupy the social space, and the rest of the industry can’t
conceive of a solution either.
Throughout this series I’ve drawn parallels with prediction markets, and
the same trend is visible there today. They are draining their own
reservoir as we speak. Players from states with no legalised gaming.
Eighteen and nineteen year old students who can now ‘trade’ on their
favourite team, or just incinerate their disposable income on five
minute BTC price markets. Those companies will be tempted to read it the
way poker did, as proof of how good they are rather than a one-time
flood, and to keep building for their important customers - the
sophisticated trader, the corporate counterparty quite happy to be fed
a customer dreaming of their ten leg parlay. It’s the same process, and
it will likely end in the same place.
Talk to most people in the gaming world and, whether they agree with my
analysis or not, they will probably tell you that poker (the product) is
too much hassle. Too difficult to operate. Not valuable enough. Many of
the new mid-market operators in the UK, like Dabble and Midnite, have
nothing at all in the space, and for giants like Bet365 it was always an
afterthought. What remains of PokerStars has somewhat taken the Betfair
mantle of ‘area of Flutter you least want to be in charge of for career
prospects’ now that exchanges are cool again. Their views are
understandable because their frame of reference is a real money product.
Once you think of the market as two separate things, and you realise
that poker players like sports (and betting on them) and casino games,
you ask questions like “why wouldn’t we want to attract these
customers?” I think they should. And I think poker should be fun. So we
built unpoker rivals.
Philip Atkinson, CEO, May 2026