Online Poker: Haven of the Young
Among the great tidings of the online poker boom, one of the largest changes in the nature of the poker online community, both online and live, is the influx of younger and younger players. Whereas before the advent of the popularity of the World Series of Poker on ESPN the average age in any card room might have been around thirty, it now seems like more and more the average approaches the legal limit of 21.
The 2008 WSOP main event winner, 24 year old Peter Eastgate, exhibited this trend about as powerfully as one could imagine, supplanting Phil Hellmuth as the youngest pokerplayer to ever win the biggest gae of all.
With these younger, different players comes a kind of play that is more aggressive and fast than had been prevalent in recent years. Younger players seem more willing to put it all on the line on draws, reraise with nothing, and apply pressure regardless of cards. This tendency results in a crazy kind of action that results in fields made up of consistently younger and younger fields. And it seems like it will just continue. Each year is a little more in this way, and the popularity doesn’t seem to be getting any less hot.
