The sudden, startling downturn in the US economy has affected almost every business arena. Poker, specifically live casino poker, is no exception. This deep recession will impact your live poker experience in several ways:

Travel Expenses: With rising prices for both gasoline and jet fuel, along with a tighter money supply, traveling to the major poker rooms in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and elsewhere around the country will become prohibitively expensive. Instead of a fun weekend excursion or a summer-long tour of your favorite casinos, your poker trips will take a back seat to paying your rising household bills with your shrinking (or non-existent) paycheck.

Closing Poker Rooms: Last year, the Las Vegas Hilton closed their poker room. This year, Planet Hollywood shut down their popular poker room and replaced it with a high-limit gaming area. In this economy, casinos are seeking to improve their profit margins wherever they can. Until the recent boom, poker barely rated as an afterthought in the minds of casino executives. Loss-leading areas like poker will be among the first amenities to feel the budget axe.

No more ‘aquariums’: Another consequence of this widespread belt-tightening is that fewer and fewer new players will put their hard-earned money down on the table. With a thinner supply of ‘fish’ in the sea, the ‘sharks’ will have no choice but to turn on each other. For those professional players on the margins of the game (i.e. those not on the tournament trail or without web site endorsement deals), their primary source of income will quickly dry up. Even top-level touring pros will feel the impact in smaller tournament fields and diminished prize pools.

As we’re seeing now, any artificially inflated economic bubble cannot be sustained. Whether the fuel for that bubble comes from buying stocks on credit, investing in junk bonds, overvaluing dot-com public offerings or bundling sub-prime mortgages, that bubble inevitably bursts with catastrophic and far-reaching consequences.

Does such a catastrophe truly sound the death-knell for the poker boom? As with any boom, this one will eventually go bust. However, such events should not be interpreted as the funeral march for poker itself. The game has survived bad times and bad people, depressions and recessions, a civil war and two world wars. As long as people have cards, chips and cash, poker will survive in one form or another.

In fact, this recession may present some wonderful opportunities to open up this great game to new arenas. In Part II, we will explore some of the silver linings available in these dark financial clouds.