Legal online poker, once all the rage, flirts with irrelevance

Saturday, February 11, 2023 1:33 PM
Photo:  Shutterstock
  • United States
  • Steve Friess, PlayUSA

It is quarter to noon on a frigid, stormy Sunday in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and there’s a grand total of 202 players logged into BetMGM’s poker site.

The site offers 16 possible Sit-n-Go single-table tournament options at all times, but right now just one lonely soul is registered for any of them, a six-player $2 game. No proper multi-table tournaments are running right now; the largest collection of folks to be found anywhere – 25 – are playing cash games with blinds of 5 and 10 cents.

You can almost hear the whistles of your laptop’s fan as digital tumbleweeds roll on by.

PokerStars is marginally better – a whopping 598 folks looking for action over there, although most sit-and-go tables there are empty, too, and the cash crowd, again, is concentrated on the kind of stakes you play with your granny at Christmas.