In September 2006, the US government issued a law stating that banks and other financial institutions were no longer authorised to transfer monies to online gambling sites. This had huge implications in online poker because it made it very difficult for US players to get money online. So many US players stopped playing online poker and now that Full Tilt Poker have temporarily closed down then this has only added to the problem. The post-UIGEA poker world is a much tougher one to make money in for sure.
This has impacted on the demographic of players on a site. There are more regular’s players now than there were before and so game selection even in levels like NL50 and NL100 has become more crucial. Regular players tend to do one of two things and they certainly multi-table on the whole. But professional players either use a maximum or a minimum stack strategy but rarely play in-between. This means that your implied odds in deep stack situations are nowhere near what it used to be.
The deep stacked regs are good players and so half of the time it will be they that have the better hand in deep stacked all in situations and not you. If you have the Qd-10d and are all in on a Kd-4c-6d-7d board and your opponent has Ad-4d then you are losing your money. Likewise with minimum stack players, your deep stack does you little good and so you do not get implied odds against these guys also. Then many of the weak fish have less than 100BB and so implied odds fall here also. So it is clear then that you need different strategies these days to just being able to exploit weak players in the old traditional way.
