When poker first popped into the imagination of the British public via television back in 1999, the players who suddenly found themselves becoming an odd sort of niche – sporting celebrities, were professionals, or competent amateurs. They looked the part, or several parts – from the calm but TV-friendly competence of Victoria Coren or the as-yet little known Hendon Mobsters, to the slick, besuited, Devilfish or Phil Hellmuth Jr., and even the extrovert, costume-changing, Jac Arama.
Whichever category they fit in, the first players to have their game scrutinised by under-table cameras, and presumably the first ever to be recognised in the street, represented years of experience garnered the only possible way, in home-games and casinos around the country and Europe. In 2002 there were 631 players in the World Series of Poker, but the poker avalanche started with a snowball made up of sunglasses, televised stare downs, and the voice of Jesse May.
Within five years, the poker landscape changed wildly. While the game has been continually but quietly popular in the U.S. (like Monopoly), the image of the gambler, especially the poker professional, was still tied in Europe to scenes in The Sting or The Cincinnati Kid. The film Rounders came closer to capturing the zeitgeist almost six years before it really came to be. But still, the rather dubious surroundings in which poker players plied their trade, reinforced stereotypes while simultaneously glamorising them. If they remade Rounders now, it would probably be filmed in Durrrr's lounge, and while fascinating for players, it would be about as dramatic for the non-initiate as watching someone file tax returns. But the cast would be even younger than Matt Damon and Edward Norton, which represents the biggest change in the game in its history.
Once people became comfortable with playing on the Internet, it still took about two years for the young players, who may have been attracted to the game by the older familiar names and personalities, to appear on the live radar, and in some cases, overtake their predecessors. These years, however, represented hundreds of thousands of hands' worth of experience, crowded into fresh young minds, who were quick to take advantage of online tools such as tracking software and the analysis of their peers.
In 2004, I still heard regular live players saying things like, "Oh, he's an Internet player," with the same tone of voice you might say, "He's a microwave chef." But now "Internet player" is no longer a deprecating term (except sometimes when a particularly manic style of play is blamed on the player's training ground having been virtual).
The average age of big tournaments' final tables has been decreasing steadily, with the first World Series of Poker Europe event being a case in point. The winner, of course, was 18-year-old Norwegian Annette Obrestad, who ended up heads up with a 22-year-old John Tabatabai. Both players are now sponsored, as are a host of others who made their name as an avatar before launching themselves on the live tournament scene using their actual names which no one apart from avid poker forum readers knew. Michael Martin, Danny Ryan, Dario Minieri, Mike McDonald, and most recently Peter Eastgate, who snapped the WSOP main event title this year at just 22-year's-old are all gracing magazines or taking down top prizes in tournaments both live and online. The young Americans who started to learn while not legally old enough to enter a card room have started to come out of the woodwork and are getting into the game at all levels.
A new set of stereotypes however has been gently setting solid while the old ones have been knocked down. Says UK pro Stuart Rutter, "Just because I'm young and I wear a funny hat, people think I'm really aggressive. I'm the biggest nit there is." While that might be a slight overstatement, there is still a lot of judgement by appearances going on, which one might think an online-trained generation might have avoided more easily. With confidence and ability comes early success, with that success sometimes comes an arrogance which threatens to blinker players – just as previous generations refused to accept that the game was evolving online. Whether or not generalisations about unknown opponents face-to-face are ever useful at all, learning not to tap the tank might be a valuable lesson for some of the young players. I have often heard people talking very loudly about what great value this or that tournament or live cash game was due to the prevalence of "old people, who are so bad it's unbelievable", by which was meant anyone over the age of 30, often within definite earshot of the value players' themselves.
Recently several bets were made on the final table of the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour's grand final event on the age of the eventual finalists and the winner. With some of the top young British players in the field, it seemed a shoo-in that they would outnumber the old guard on the final. However it was an even split and the heads up was decided between Paul "Pab" Foltyn, supported by all young players everywhere, and Jeff Duvall, supported by the entire Victoria Casino. There couldn't have been a better showcase of old versus young players, simply because they were a match for each other. Duvall had almost invisibly built a good stack throughout the tournament, and Foltyn, along with fellow internet prodigy Chris Moorman, had been leading in chips at the end of the first day.
The chip lead swung six times during one of the most exciting heads up battles of the year, resulting in a final victory for Foltyn and a lot of relieved young bettors. Duvall, who has a very respectable poker rap sheet, was one of the most gracious runners-up I've seen (saying, "Good for him, I'm glad he won. I've been there, done that…"), and is also the only person in his age bracket to whom the term "lagtard" might be applied in relation to his short-handed play. While I agree that the majority of games are now dominated by those who learned to play while in their teens, and will continue to be as the sheer weight of numbers combine with the undoubtedly deep skill pool – poker is still anyone's game. If the untouchable Doyle Brunson can play H.O.R.S.E. for 22 hours in one day (the 2006 $50,000 WSOP Championship), and survive High Stakes Poker, with his reputation, amongst young and old, there's really no need to hang up one's hat when one gets a bus pass. 