The New Day Traders

Losing money in Vegas is always an educational experience. (Those who win, I am now convinced, learn absolutely nothing.) In dropping a modest sum over the course of 48 hours, I learned quite a bit indeed. Most of it came from conversations like this:

So, where you from?
San Francisco. What about you?
Chicago, originally. But I live here now.
Since when?
Oh, about three weeks ago.

There were plenty of them. They came from Boston, Denver, Nashville, London, Cape Town, and Sydney. And they all seem to have arrived in the last six months. These are people, mostly young, who have forsaken any and all rational thought process and instead attempted to make their living playing poker.

Obviously, plenty of rich professional poker players exist - thanks to ESPN, the Travel Channel, Fox Sports Network, and NBC, we know many of them well. Because of the poker boom, there's more money to be made in poker than ever (your correspondent has met with fair success online, but the real fun comes from the sheer illegality of internet poker). So it's no surprise that more people than ever think they can pay the rent doing it.

Sadly, the situation is fairly predictable from an economic standpoint. When "day trading" took off during the tech stock bubble, throngs quit their jobs and flocked to E*Trade where they made hundreds an hour. Now we have these guys, who think they can do it playing cards. When the market shakes out, the most profitable will emerge, and the least profitable will go broke. And that means that the Las Vegas population spike consists largely of Johnny-come-latelys who've come to dump money to each other and the established pros already there.

There's a poker bubble forming, and the ones standing at the end are gonna be the ones who were there in the beginning. I fear for the people I met this weekend, who will have moved to Vegas to lose money, instead of just visiting.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and just really, really bitter.