The Generation of Experienced Novices

by Daniel Kimberg | Published: Nov 07, 2003

When I was growing up, I used to stop by the video game arcades after school on an almost daily basis to play a few games of whatever was hot that month. I never got particularly good at any one game, at least not by the lofty standards of the average video game junkie. I probably did fairly well for the amount of time I put into it, but there was no way to keep up with the real hard-core players. They seemed to be in the arcade around-the-clock, clogging up the high scoreboards and hogging the machines for hours on a single quarter, and occasionally even drawing a crowd. We used to wonder if the Air Force would be well-advised to train fighter pilots in video arcades, for all the effort that was spent there developing finely honed reflexes.

These days, the arcades are a little less populous, in part because you can play some pretty good games at home, both on game consoles and on general-purpose computers. The games still cost money, and the hardware can be quite expensive. But the price per game goes down the more you play, and you get all the comforts of home, although not necessarily the ambience (such as it is) of the video arcade.

Over the last few years, there's been an important shift in the focus of computer games, away from games you play against the computer, or against a friend sitting next to you, and toward network-enabled games you can play against other players anywhere in the world. If you like racing games, you can nudge a competitor from Sweden into the wall to take the checkered flag. If you like strategy games, you can team up with friends from California and Texas to double-cross another team from Toronto, Ottawa, and Edmonton. Your competition isn't limited by whoever happens to be in your house or in the arcade at the moment. The details of the games span a wide range. Some are free, while others require a subscription fee. Many offer ranking systems, tournament competition, and a variety of play options. Some are merely time-consuming, while others have turned out to be, on occasion, ruinously addictive. Game publishers have only begun to explore the possibilities afforded by a world in which connections to the Internet are commonplace.

So, how is this relevant to poker? In many respects, online poker is to cardrooms what online computer games are to video arcades. The online forms allow a concentrated form of practice that was previously unavailable to most players. For money games, online poker (where legal) has made games dramatically more available, around-the-clock, at a variety of limits, in a variety of game configurations. No-limit hold'em tournaments used to be hard to come by. Now, you can find a variety going off at just about any time of the day. Although the options are somewhat more limited for play money games, the opportunity to develop reasonably good poker skills before buying your first actual chips has never been greater.

A particularly interesting point of divergence is the demographics of the players. Online computer games are often dominated by teenagers. And it's not that just teenagers find the games most appealing – plenty of 30-somethings with real jobs find the games just as engrossing. But, teenagers are both old enough to get pretty good at the games and young enough not to have to lose their jobs to do so (although I suspect more than a few kids have lost after-school jobs, and cut into their study time). They can devote an amount of effort that few other demographic groups can manage. Online poker is a bit different. Teenagers generally can't play poker for money legally, in either real or virtual cardrooms. But with the play money games available at virtually every online poker site, teenagers can get plenty of practice before they turn 21. And as is the case with video games, they tend to have a lot more disposable time than players just a few years older. Although I don't know the demographics of the play money games on the popular online poker sites, I do know that those games are thriving, typically outnumbering the money games handily.

Although many serious poker players trace their skills back to well before they could legally play in casinos, few if any could claim the sheer volume of practice one can now get routinely, both online and via computer-based tools. I'd personally played the equivalent of hundreds of hours of tournament no-limit hold'em online before I ever sat down at a casino table. I can't claim to have terrorized the tables, but I've certainly done much better than I would have if I'd had to pay for my lessons in cash. And the practice I was able to get was fairly limited compared to what's available today. There are certainly additional skills associated with live poker that may keep some of these players from excelling beyond the online arena. And likewise, there may be players who will be only mediocre at online poker who will benefit greatly from face-to-face competition. But on the whole, the ready availability of training at a variety of forms of poker raises the possibility of a dramatic change in the kinds of players in the average cardroom.

Although online poker has obviously had some impact on live poker, my guess is that a big wave of online-trained players hitting the brick-and-mortar cardrooms is still a few years off. The popularity of online poker probably matured about two years ago, although it hasn't peaked, and it takes time for all those players to filter into the cardroom. Most intriguingly, 16-year-olds who started spending endless nights learning to play poker at that time are still too young to play poker for money, either online or live. In all probability, there's a growing generation of underage future poker players getting orders of magnitude more practice than any previous generation. And eventually, some of them will want to see what that green felt actually feels like. It may make the games a bit tougher when the next generation of novices arrives with a lot of card-playing experience. Or, it might not. But it will certainly be interesting to see.