Why Playing Winning Poker Is More Challenging than Ever!

A frequent complaint from players is that poker seems to be getting harder and that it is more challenging than ever to keep up. This article investigates whether poker has gotten harder and offers a few tips for dealing with it.

Imagine that you have been transported back to the heyday of poker. It’s 2003, and you have all of your 2022 poker knowledge and skills. How do you think you would fare at the tables?

On the other hand, imagine that it is 2003, and you have just discovered No-Limit Texas Hold’em. You spend the next year studying religiously – and then magically transported to 2022.

• What do you suppose would be your fate in the 2022 games?
• How would your skills stack up even versus a relative newbie to the game?

It’s not hard to imagine that the first scenario would be incredible and the second – not so much!

In 2003, there was very little quality poker education available. But with the poker book came an explosion in poker training resources. Some of it was good, but most of it was objectively terrible.

Now, we are fortunate to have very high-quality books, videos, membership sites, discord groups, solvers, trainers, and more. The result of all this information explosion can be thought of as skill inflation.