Poker 2009: The Year In Review

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2009 was, in many ways, a fairly unremarkable year for poker. Then again, in other ways, it wasn’t.

That ambivalence, ineloquently phrased as it may be above, is actually a fairly accurate reading of poker’s pulse for 2009. As an industry and a community, there seemed to be a great deal of uncertainty regarding not only whether or not things were going well, but what constituted going well in the first place.

Was the thriving poker training economy eroding the very ecosystem it relied on for existence by extending the skill gap between the have and the have-nots to an untenable canyon? In a post-UIGEA era, did legislative progress just mean holding at the status quo? Did the increasing consolidation (and geographical fragmentation) of the industry serve as a sign of natural maturation or the harbinger of an impending player drought?

Beats us. We do know, however, that a lot happened, we wrote about some of it and linked out to the rest and have now distilled that into our month-by-month buckshot drilldown of the year that was 2009 in the the pokerverse.

January 2009
Phil Galfond entered the world of online poker training, this time as a site owner as opposed to his brief run as Cardrunners instructor, with the launch of BlueFire Poker. Fellow nosebleed phenom Tom Dwan went on a nasty downswing that would set the tone for his year right out of the gate. Amarillo Slim was beaten and robbed and word broke that Vanessa Russo would be appearing in SI’s swimsuit issue.

PokerStars announced that they wanted your hand histories for a project that would, essentially, attempt to prove that poker was a game of skill and not luck by showing that the hand that would win if there was no betting is often not the hand that wins in Hold’em. Full Tilt Poker continued to battle a lawsuit from Clonie Gowan and also found itself under a somewhat uncomfortable spotlight after a rash of account bannings showed that cheating was fairly common at the room, while also proving that FTP was working diligently to snuff it out.

Daniel Negreanu may have went a little crazy.

February 2009
Gus Hansen lost a boxing match to fellow poker pro Theo Jorgensen, a defeat perhaps forecasted when Hansen chose to arrive at the ring via wheelchair. Carter King had a real-life-sweat when he was potentially facing charges related (peripherally) to his involvement in the Michael Phelps bong-gate. JJ Prodigy was busted for multi-accounting (ahhhhgain!), this time at Cake Poker.

Tom Dwan was about to start play in the durrrr challenge.

A South Carolina judge ruled that poker was a game of skill, but that you could still break the law by profiting from running a game. Barney Frank continued his efforts to promote regulation of online gambling, and a Price Waterhouse Cooper study concluded that such regulation could generate upwards of $52 billion in new revenue for the US Federal Government.

March 2009
Phil Galfond and Bluefire Poker came up with one of the more creative PR stunts of the year by challenging the US Federal Government to a $1 million match of heads up poker. Layne Flack had a DUI that wasn’t and missed the NHUC as a result. Annie Duke had a few choice words for critics of her run on Celebrity Apprentice.

Party Poker finance director Martin Weigold made headlines when he said that he felt “reasonably optimistic” about the chances of the US market reopening to sites such as Party in the “not too distant future”. Australia made headlines with a plan to filter out objectionable content from the internet, including a number of online poker sites. Cigital made headlines with a deep report, drawn from 100 million plus hands of online, that purported to offer statistical proof that poker was, in fact, a game of skill.

PokerStars signed up their 20 millionth account. Bugsy’s Club closed their doors. Full Tilt lost their UFC sponsorship role to competing room Ultimate Bet.

Huck Seed, 40 years old, started taking action of a prop bet that would force him to run a mile in under 4:39.

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