Everybody says today that the online poker games are harder and the number of fish is slowly declining. I will not enter this debate, but a question bugs me:
Until what stakes is one expected, and/or expecting to find fish?
I doubt that we will see too soon rich people, clueless about poker, creating an account on Pokerstars and beginning to learn the game directly at NL200 6max.
Skilful 14 Jul 2015
Hey Zanardi, good question. i was chatting with my coach recently and asked him at mid stakes does most of his profit come from beating regs or from fish, and he said definately fish, profit in poker aways comes from fish. Maxaimum profit you might get from beating regs is very small compared to when fish are present and the good players will not even play each other unless a bad player is on the table and then they quickly fill up with a waiting list so there are just fewer fish as you move up but still present I would say.
I have started watching a good documentary recently called nosebleeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju_7_595mDE and 
NOSEBLEED (English Version HD)www.youtube.com
these guys play some of the highest stakes. When Gus Hanson was about they said they considered him to be a fish and made alot of money from him online, so even at the nosebleeds good players still find fish relative to their ability. You probabally need to be better all around as you move up, and a fish at a higher stake would be a good player maybe down at a lower stake, but there are still fishes at all the limits.
Also in that same documentary they say at one point they moved up from playing 5k buyin games to 20k buyins and the play was much worse at the 20k buyins!
Zanardi 16 Jul 2015
Does that mean that there are also fish at the highest stakes?
Arty Mcfly 25 Jul 2015
Yes. Nosebleed games hardly ever run unless there is a "donator" that sits down. In the past it was Guy Laliberté and Andy Beal. Without the "whale", there's no incentive for the sharks to sit down. In live tourneys, it's millionaire businessmen like Bill Perkins or Talal Shakerchi (both of whom are not quite as bad at poker as some people think) that create an incentive for pros to play super high rollers. None of the regs have a big enough edge over other regs to beat the rake on their own. They need the fish to buy-in to create the "dead money".
Online, things are so bad on Pokerstars that players are seat-scripting and bum-hunting at 100NL FFS. Fortunately, there are other sites available where there is still a good rec:reg ratio. It's why there are people beating 200NL on Bovada, Unibet, 888 or SkyPoker, that would have trouble beating 25NL on Stars.
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