The Pool Is Drying Up

A conventional measure of how how many fish are sitting at an online poker table is the average number of players who see a flop. This is one of the standard statistics shown in the main lobby of a poker site. Here's a screen shot I took this morning of the Full Tilt Rush lobby, filtered for just the micro and low stakes NLHE games:

The thing that jumps out at me are all the sub 20% numbers in the full-ring games. As late as just a few months ago, these stats for the $25NL and under games would typically be running over 20%, frequently as high as 22-25% for the micro games, and 20-22% for the low-stakes games.  (Generally speaking, the lower this Plr/Flp number, the tighter/better the opposition is playing on average. Conversely, the higher the number, the fishier the games.)

In recent weeks, my normal $25 and $50NL FR games are now often running down around 17%, which has been a range usually reserved for $100NL or above. Note that even the lowly $5NL Rush games are running at a fairly respectable 19%.

Said another way: the Rush games have gotten seriously less fishy in the past couple of months. In other words, the micro- and low-stakes Rush games have suddenly become much tougher to beat. There be new sharks in dem waters, captain! Lots and lots of sharks. Poker is getting harder to play.

In addition to the Plr/Flp stats, two other items tend to support my claim that the games are getting seriously harder. First is a series of 2p2 threads I've read recently that indicate that higher stakes professional players are finding that they can increase their $/hour rate by simply stepping down in limits-- and they are. In droves. A winning player at, say, $100NL finds that he can play more tables per hour at, say, $25NL with a higher ptbb/100 rate, and therefore make more bucks per minute than at the higher stakes. So he moves down and feasts on the fish. More and more sharks are catching on to this reality, and are swimming up into the shallow end of our pool to play.

The other thing that supports my games-are-getting-harder assertion is my overall win rate. My ptbb/100 win rate has dropped precipitously in the last few months to a point where I'm barely breaking even at the $25Nl games. Over the past 20K hands, I've gone from 3.5ptbb/100 to 0.5ptbb/100. All my stats look good, I don't think I've developed any new leaks, and I'm not really running bad. Instead, I'm simply playing against better opponents.

Maybe it's time for me to drop down in stakes, too. If you can't beat 'em, join em?

The bottom line is that this sucks. We need online poker legalized so that a new school of players can be released into the ocean and the sharks can go back to the deep end where they belong.

It's either that, or we're going to have to seriously step up our game. One way to survive a shark attack is to be a bigger shark. Time to get better, fellow guppies.

All-in for now....
-Bug