Remembering the online poker five years ago shortly after
Black Friday, it’s easy to discern its differences from the current one. Even
over the past two years, we have witnessed many administrative changes and
industry shifts that could not but affect the future of poker.

In many respects this also applies to the world of MTT.
Since the online cache has been significantly depleted over the past three
years, many players have decided to make MTT their main source of profit, but
the game is changing too rapidly. Options available sites and games have
changed significantly during this time.

With current trends, it is possible to make predictions on
how the world of tournament poker will look like in a few years, and in this
article we will talk about what the industry can become.

Progressive knockout tournaments have become one of the main
products of Poker Stars last year, and they are not going anywhere anytime
soon. It is likely that these tournaments will overtake traditional freeze out
tournaments in popularity.

Since many sites are beginning to actively raise rake in
re-buy tournaments, and hyper-turbo ROIs are sharply reduced, many of them
follow the example of Poker Stars and add progressive knockout tournaments to
their schedules. But what is there, this model is adopted by offline events –
bounty offline tournaments have been popular for many years.

In the end, we will see how in these tournaments the average
skill of players will significantly increase as soon as Holdem Resources
release a bounty calculator. After that, the regulars will start actively
learning the math of these tournaments and the average ROI will decrease, so
now is the time to make money until the feeder is overflowing with people who
want to make money.

Looking at the trends in online poker relative to
recreational players over the past few years, one picture emerges quite clearly
– recreational players are less attracted to online poker when they know that
there is a high probability that they will play against professionals who use
software to gain an advantage over them.

Add to this the fact that many amateur players are sure that
everything is tweaked, and poker sites use their bots to collect their money.
From here it becomes obvious why many recreational players no longer want to
invest money in online poker.

It is likely that in the next five years, and perhaps even
in the next two years, one large and well-known poker site will try to
completely ban all forms of supporting software in an attempt to reverse this
trend.

In the short term, regular multi-tabular players will be
replaced by other regulars, with whom less tough games will come, and in the
long-term, there will be a shift in the poker economy towards encouraging
recreational players and the corresponding game. 90% of regulars will perceive
these changes very negatively, and the remaining 10% will most likely even
start to win more than they do now, as soon as they adapt to new realities.

Since Black Friday, tournament elites have been replaced
more than once. Gone are the days when the WPT and the WSOP, based in North
America, were the high point of tournament poker.

Over the past five years, tournament buy-ins have grown
steadily – $ 25k, $ 50K, $ 100K, and even higher. Most of the events occurred
at the time of the now-non-existent EPT, where the fields were unbearably hard.

In Europe, at this time, many of the best players became
even better, playing regularly against each other in these events, while their
North American counterparts, for whom constant flights across the ocean were
less practical, respectively, lagged far behind.

Add to this the fact that most online rooms with the
toughest fields do not accept players from America, which is why we are
witnessing a global shift in the poker food chain. Within ten years, Russia
will certainly overtake the United States as the global poker superpower, and
most likely Brazil, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Canada will follow.