Since Black Friday, the state of poker has been up in the air. Would the shutting down of the three main poker websites in the US by the Department of Justice cause people to stop gambling?

Would it cause people to stop gambling in the US? Would it turn away millions of dollars as a result?

All of these questions also came into play because of the huge dollars that online gambling is consistently bringing in. Now that Black Friday is a few years behind us, what exactly is its effect on the world? One way to gauge how well poker is doing is to look at the popular poker tournaments that already have decade-long histories.

First of all there is the World Series of Poker, or WSOP. This is a big-dollar tournament that hands out multi- millions in payouts to the top table winners. The main tables were yet to happen when Black Friday first occurred. It was encouraging to organizers that though the market was shaken, people were still signing up for hotel rooms in Las Vegas to visit the WSOP in record numbers as expected.

There was no mass exodus from poker or from the WSOP to speak of. This was an early sign that poker was not a dying market…regardless of what the US Department of Justice did. There was enough of a market to continue to work with as gamblers reeled from the changes.

Another sign that poker gambling online is going to be fine is the sheer number of people who are signed up for the coming World Poker Tour, or WPT. They are also coming in as projected, or better. People love the WPT because of its innovation.

This was the first poker tour to embed a camera in the table and give viewers the opportunity to see the player’s hole cards live during the tournament. This offered viewers a personal investment in the gambling and put a new spin on viewership as a whole. Players love to watch poker as much as they love to play it.

Despite the changes going on in the US market regarding online poker gambling, it likely is not going to die anytime soon.