Patrick Leonard Asks: Is Poker In a Really Good Place Right Now?

Why Patrick Leonard is Happy with The State of Poker

It seems like Pads was thinking about poker a lot in October 2024, paying special attention to its state as an industry. So, in his post on X he shared his thoughts with an emphasis on reasons for poker being popular and expanding for now:

“Anybody else think poker is in a really good place rn? 

GG / Stars / WPT / ACR / Coin / Winamax /Phenom? going pretty hard

WSOP / EPT / WPT / Triton / PokerGo going pretty hard.

Poker streams showing poker off to numbers we haven’t seen before. GG about to make WSOP mainstream worldwide. 

Players from all over the world playing, you can travel to almost every country possible and there will be an up and coming poker scene.

More content creators than we’ve ever had.

Of course there’s bad actors in our industry but I think that’s partly down to how big we’ve gotten. If the industry can manage the threat of security/ real time assistance / GTOW we have a very very good future ahead of us. 

Of course they are huge hurdles but crack those and it feels like we are cooking 👩🏻‍🍳”

But what stats support the claim about poker’s unprecedented success by 2024?

Well, we collected some of them in screenshots for you to put in perspective.

Interesting Poker Stats On October 21th, 2024

We start with online poker rooms traffic that we can gain from free and public sources.

On October 21^st, 2024 at 2:17 pm GMT statistical website PokerScout was showing the following numbers from poker rooms:

For the most popular streaming poker brand PokerGO, Triton Poker brand, poker rooms GGPoker and PokerStars, Socialblade website that tracks YouTube channel stats was showing these stats:

Another statistical website — StreamCharts — also had some curious stats of the “Poker” category on Twitch:

Keep in mind that some stats can’t be gained from rooms and channels. It relates to, for example, PokerGo viewers rates from subscribers or the amount of people who watch streams or VODs from one account at the same time.

Other Players’ Opinions About The State of Poker

Since Patrick asked people about their thoughts on the state of poker, many players gladly responded to it. And not all opinions were all sunshine and roses. We collect a few polarized examples to show variations of their views.

Joey Ingram: Lots of good stuff going on and more people investing in poker than I have ever seen before. It should get interesting.

CeegeePoker: Right now the biggest issue is that the most liquidity is in the wrong hands. GG is pumping rake and looking to mostly increase their bottom line at the expense of the players. When Stars and FTP were big it was way better for online poker. 

Live poker seems good rn

Ben: GG / Stars / ACR aren’t trustworthy sites and deserve intense scrutiny for their integrity problems.

Even if those sites were trustworthy, RTA and bots are so widespread that the game isn’t worth playing for people who don’t already have deep pockets and money to burn for entertainment.

Anyone being proselytized into the game with such foundational integrity concerns are being exploited for their checking accounts and most of them will likely damage their financial stability as a result.

atarirobby: PokerStars couldn’t be more stagnant in the US.  Only three states can play since 2016, MI and NJ teamed up in 2022 and can’t convince NJ to join let alone convince the other states who do have online poker on the books to open up shop.

WinningWealthWisdom (✈️,🏨): Rake going up both live and online, the field even the recs studying with solvers, maybe for the elite players like you it’s great but I can’t imagine it working for anyone who doesn’t eat, live and breathe the game.

Gabriele Lo Iacono: If you think about tournaments I agree, if you think about cash, things are going downhill fast.

Wayne Blodwell: I’d guess its less operator or influencer driven, more economy driven. If disposable cash decreases (cos of jobs/tax/crypto etc) then poker suffers, I’d guess?

Anyone ever mapped macro economy to poker economy?

Wonder if Sunday Million prize pool is a barometer of poker health?

If you want to share your opinion, feel free to use our comment section below.