Games are springing up everywhere. There seems to be no shortage of players.
This may depend on where you live. In my rural area, there used to be no casinos closer than Foxwoods/Mohegan Sun, which are roughly a 3-hour drive away.
As a result, there used to be a ton of home games and social hall games around me. I could play 3-4 times per week easily, if I wanted.
In the past few years, Rivers Schenectady, MGM Springfield and Resorts World Catskill opened. None of these are particularly close to me -- the drive ranges from 60-90 minutes. But it does seem to have dried up a lot of the private/social hall poker action.
There are still games, but I know of only 1-2 others (besides my own) in my entire county which go off even once per month, sometimes less often. And those are pretty bad games. The player pool is small enough in my county — pop. 60,000 — that you hear about pretty much any new action. I might estimate the number of regular players in the whole county as 60 or fewer.
There was also a big underground club about 45 minutes from me which ran games 5-6 days per week. This was busted multiple times, and kept reopening after a pause, but finally gave it up when Rivers opened.
At the same time, I’m not seeing any new “strong economy” effects which benefit the players in my own game.
In the past two years, we’ve lost a bunch of regulars to financial issues. I currently have five former regulars (who showed up like clockwork every time, for many years) who now say they don’t have enough money to play.
You might think that this was just an excuse, but each of them has asked to stay on my notification list, hoping to return. Still every two weeks comes the reply with an embarrassed version of the phrase “still no money.”
Just last week, one ref who has been super-regular and owns a wood flooring business confessed that he’s broke, and canceled... Maybe if I had more regs with lots of stock investments, it would be different.
We reduced the game frequency from weekly to every two weeks. I’m still able to get a two-table tourney together most times, but it is way more of a struggle, even with extra efforts to recruit new players.
If I were closer to a big city, maybe this would be different. I’m not a huge fan of any of the casinos near me, but they at least offer games at any time I want to show up. I’d much prefer to play in non-casino games if I could find enough.