The Atlantic: Where The Card Sharks Feed

The Atlantic has a very well written article published overnight Wednesday that discusses how poker “fish” have migrated to land-based casinos ever since a handful of top online poker sites exited the US market back in 2011.

And it hasn’t always been pretty according to David Samuels:

“They are bad at poker yet continue to play,” he writes.

Here is an excerpt from the piece:

Like any complex ecosystem, a poker room offers much more than a binary relationship between predators and prey. John Calvin (not his real name) swims somewhere in the middle. He is a grinder, a cautious type who doesn’t bluff that often or do anything hair-raisingly spectacular in tight situations, and who makes his living by doggedly adhering to the odds against lesser players. He got his start making a few dollars a hand on the Web site PartyPoker, then graduated to long weekends of live play at the Borgata before taking up residence at a casino poker room in Charles Town, West Virginia. These days, he commutes from his home, in Washington, D.C., to Maryland Live, where he feeds on fish who are happy to lose a few hundred dollars an hour playing No Limit Texas Hold ’Em—the poker player’s game of choice since 2003, when the great American online-poker boom of the aughts took off.

It will be interesting to see if the likes of John Calvin will begin making similar treks across the Hudson and Camden Rivers to start playing with legal online poker rooms in the state of New Jersey without having to go all the way to Atlantic City. Head to the nearest park and log on.  Start playing with real money.  After all, there is an even better feeding frenzy to be found with all those New Jersey fish swimming.

- Nagesh Rath, Gambling911.com