I found a very well-written post over at thepokerchronicles.com (http://www.thepokerchronicles.com/archives/000940.html) which starts out about the current Absolute Poker situation and the possibility of someone having access to the hole cards, but goes on to discuss the future survival of online poker at all. It’s a good read. I’m not entirely sure I agree with the future being quite as gloomy as he makes it out to be, but the risk is there. I happen to believe there can be other ways for players to prove to the sites that they aren’t bots other than CAPTCHAs, but this is not where today’s post is going.

No, today’s post concerns the fact that most of us lack perspective of the bigger picture of poker in general and online poker specifically. We’re just getting started! Online poker, in the form it’s available today - with real money changing hands - has been around for less than a decade. Less than 10 years - in a world where technology is booming like crazy. Most of Asia is just now getting started online and the internet and its applications will change dramatically over the next decade, no doubt. What online poker will look like in 10 years is too soon for anyone to say, really. What it will look like in 50 years is surely impossible to say, except that we can be quite certain that it won’t be much like today.

But poker changing is not just a matter of technology, it’s also a matter of theory. You think that Harrington wrote the ultimate texts on tournament play? They’re good books, but they’re getting dated. The same most definitely goes for Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players.

Every day, people discover things about poker that hasn’t yet been covered by any book. We’re pushing boundaries, and it’s safe to say that five years from now, some texts that today are considered timeless and true, will feel about as relevant and modern then as Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants” does today. Poker books, as in texts on the theory of how to play, will be celebrating 30 years next year with Doyle Brunson’s “Super System.” 30 years - in a complex mathematical field. We have a ways to go.

Poker can probably be solved, at the very least limit poker. But we’re not there yet. I’d guess that there are now more people playing - and working to figure out - poker than even knew what “hold ‘em” was 20 years ago. The market is flooded with new books, many of which are perhaps not worthwhile, but it still shows that people feel that they have something to say that others will pay them for. Some of these people are right.

Some others, some high stakes cash pros, claim to know stuff about poker that has never been published in a book. I’ve had the privilege of picking some of their brains at rare occasions, and I’d believe that to be true. They don’t just sit and play poker, they do their homework - often using PokerStove and Microsoft Excel, and then analyzing the results. They don’t publish what they know because they want to make their money while they’re still alone in knowing. But at some point, their secrets will approach common knowledge at which point someone will want to be the first one to make money off of the book. And “how to play proper poker” takes another step forward. Not to mention that there are researchers working on these things as well, and they most definitely will want to publish their results.

Is TheMaroon correct in the post I linked above, that we only have five years until online poker is swamped with bots, making the games essentially unplayable? Perhaps. I’d like to think that there are ways around it, but he has a point and the warning he raises should be noted. My own point, though not necessarily contrary to his, is that we have every reason to believe that online poker will look very different a decade from now. It’s going to be interesting to see how this turns out.