If there is one thing there is too much of in the poker world, it is live poker tournament circuits. How many $5k-$10k events can people afford to buy-in to these days? Notably, the amount of fish in these tournaments will dwindle, as rich people have lost so much money in the stock market and such. That leaves the satellite winners and the pros, and there are only so many satellite winners. The pros will eventually see the tournaemnts they are playing are sharkier and will bust out or quit and move off to finer pastures.

Anyhow, here are a few predictions:

World Series Of Poker: The WSOP Main Event (and the other events) will remain strong. Perhaps not as strong as last year, but they will always attract a large gathering.  However, the circuit events will continue to suffer. They will likely continue to scratch some of these events, since they won’t be worth having with 60-70 players playing.

World Poker Tour: Are they even still around? As indicated by their stock price, the WPT is suffering. Americans are saving up for the WSOP. Europeans enjoy playing the EPT. Who cares about the WPT and their super-large buy-in tournaments? No one, that’s who.

European Poker Tour: The EPT will continue to be strong. Most of the buy-ins are reasonable- around $5-$7k and poker is just getting more and more popular in Europe. Europeans don’t want to travel all the way to the USA for poker tournaments,  no matter how much they enjoy playing no limit poker.

WSOP Europe: A grand idea by Harrahs, but so far it is falling flat on its face. They need to lower the buy-in, though the British Pound’s continued decline is kinda doing that for them anyways. All things being equal, the EPT looks like it will crush WSOP Europe, but don’t count it out just yet.