Is There Potential for Another US Poker Boom?

Players Want to Know US Poker Potential

Poker is an area of the online gambling world that’s a bit different than virtually anything else. It’s generally seen as the main “skill-based” form of gambling that happens on a large scale. The popularity and viability of the game has fluctuated over time, however.

With more players able to get in on the action thanks to state-based legislation, many are left wondering if this could lead to another online poker boom in the United States.

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as things were the last time around. We saw a big boom that started almost 20 years ago, and the situation was different then. However, there’s still plenty of potential for an explosion of popularity once again. With that having been said, understanding the particulars of what makes the present situation different is key.

Here we’re going to take a look at all of the ins and outs of a potential US online poker boom.

Understanding the Landscape

The first thing to understand on this topic is the legal landscape. In the United States, there is a split between federal law and state law. Certain things can be covered by federal law, but others have to be covered by state law. This balance between federal authority and states rights is similar to how member nations of the European Union have a balance between their own laws and the laws they have agreed to under the EU courts.

Overall, there are two things that affect online gambling the most on the federal level. The first is the Wire Act, a law from the 1960s that was put in place well before the Internet. The purpose of the law was to make it easier to go after organized crime-operated sports betting operations. As a result, it prohibits taking sports bets over “telephone lines.” This has previously been interpreted to include other types of gambling over the Internet. However, this has never been established in court, and that’s something that will eventually have to happen.

The second issue is the UIGEA, or the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The UIGEA, in turn, does two things. First, is makes it illegal for banks to process deposits for “illegal online gambling.” If the gambling is legal, making the deposits is perfectly legal. Second, it makes it illegal for a company run an online gambling business without a license. This second point is particularly interesting because no licenses were offered in any way, shape or form in the United States at the time the law was passed, and there was no interest by any of the states to do so.

The Shift in the Times

The poker boom started around 2002. A number of factors contributed to it like television shows centering around poker tournaments. There was also a man with the fortunate name of Chris Moneymaker who won the World Series of Poker after qualifying through an online tournament.

This is the perfect combination of events that shot poker’s popularity through the roof the first time around. However, legislation like the UIGEA combined with alternative interpretations of the Wire Act created a problem that killed it. In short, if the Wire Act is interpreted to make online poker illegal, then the UIGEA makes banks processing those deposits illegal as well. As a result, banks washed their hands of the situation and just stopped processing deposits.

Fast forward to modern times, and we don’t have to worry about this dynamic anymore. However, there are other issues that have to be navigated that are specific to the modern era.

The Case for a New Poker Boom

The case for a new poker boom is simple: More states than ever are regulating online gambling. This means that more players than ever in the US have an option to play government-regulated games.

That sounds great on paper, and chances are that these numbers will continue to expand. However, poker is a specific type of gambling that creates a specific type of problem:

Without a large enough overall player pool, you can’t get much growth in the game.

The player pool from a single state simply isn’t enough to sustain the ecosystem of players required for poker. However, some states have gotten around this in the past by having player pool sharing agreements. The idea is simple: Players are put all into the same pool. Funds for the state are then divided up based on where the players were who generated them.

To be frank, the only chance we have for a major poker boom in the United States is in this type of agreement, and without it, we’re probably not going to see much happen. If all or most of the states regulating the game agree, we have some really good chances for it.

However, not all the glimmers is gold. There’s a flip side to this situation as well.

Poker Boom or Bust?

One of the things that made the poker boom work so well was that the game was new to many. The most popular type of poker at the time was no-limit hold’em. The key issue is that it hadn’t been popular for that long. A lot of people who got into poker then didn’t even know the rules.

That’s different now. Most people who have grown up playing card games in the past 30 years know the rules. They know basic strategy, and they know where the resources are online to get better at the game if they so desire.

As a result, you don’t have a massive number of strategically weak players to fuel the game. This is something you need to sustain the poker ecosystem in a boom-type situation. With that having been said, there will surely be plenty of weaker players to keep the games going. The question is about how many there will be and how long they’ll stick around.

Good Chances But Not 100 Percent

Overall, what this all boils down to is that we do actually have some chances for a poker boom. We may not see it in 2021 or 2022, but the potential is definitely there. With the games opening up, it’s been long enough since the last boom for a new generation of players to be available, and that can be what fuels the lower end of the player pool for the poker ecosystem to work from the ground up.

However, it’s not a guarantee. We don’t know if the games are going to be popular like they once were. With the way fads and trends work, we could even end up with a poker boom for a different version of the game. We simply don’t know, and there’s enough randomness in the situation to make it interesting.

With all of that said, there is something we do know for sure. We absolutely will not get a poker boom without state-led player sharing agreements. There simply will not be enough players to sustain it. That aside, we do have great chances, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens. If things fall in the right way, we could see poker open up as one of the most popular games in the world once again.