Winning at poker wasn't a big deal a few years ago, when the online poker fever peaked. The online poker rooms were packed full of fish, many of whom played not ABC poker, but something much worse, like weak-tight or weak-aggressive. Reliable poker advice was scarce online and those who knew how to take advantage of the hapless masses weren't keen on sharing their secrets. These were the golden days of online poker, when the fish pool at Party Poker looked quite bottomless and inexhaustible. New players signed up every day by the droves, and for every player who managed to claw his way out of the beginner-rut, 10 more would pop up.
These days, winning at poker is entirely different story. The 2011 UIGEA and various other US government actions that came in its wake, have decimated online traffic. Nowadays, it's safe to say that the recreational kind of poker player has pretty much been forced to abandon the virtual felt. These were guys who played for the heck of it, and now, since it's been made so difficult for them to access online poker rooms and play for real money, they've pretty much given up. The quality of the action has picked up as those successful stayed and those responsible for bringing in the money left.
Several examples can be almost effortlessly produced to illustrate this ominous shift in the quality of online poker games. A few years ago for instance, taking advantage of the almost magical powers of the c-bet was a guaranteed ticket to the cookie-jars of most of the beginners. After all, a guy who bet or raised before the flop and then followed it up with a post-flop bet was sure to have something… These days, c-bets have lost much of their luster. People will almost automatically call c-bets just to see what the c-betting guy's reaction is on the turn. Those who fire that second barrel have to be prepared to fire the third one too these days, and making that sort of commitment to a pot on nothing but a marginal hand is much more complicated than it used to be.
The bottom line: times are changing, and until the game gets legalized in the US (read: not in the foreseeable future), games will continue to get tougher and tougher. It will take nothing short of a second online poker popularity explosion to make winning at poker easy again.