It’s that time of year again; time to pull out my crystal ball for a little poker prognostication, and for 2012 the predictions are very bold!

2012 will finally be the Year of the Woman

For the past two years I’ve predicted that a woman would win an open WSOP tournament, so this year I’m going to up the ante despite the cold-spell women have had in the WSOP since2008. For 2012 I’m predicting that a Woman will not only win an open WSOP tournament, but will also break through on the World Poker Tour, and (yes another AND) will make the final table of the WSOP Main Event.

Attendance will be down across the board at major poker tournaments

With the current online poker climate still in utter chaos, and online poker being the breeding ground of live tournament players, poker attendance has seemingly hit its peak. We started to see this at the tail-end of 2011, and despite the excellent turnouts at the 2011 WSOP and WSOPE, with most of the US poker world having had a full year of ZERO online poker, many players have moved on to other pursuits.

I also feel the lack of televised poker events will further push poker to the back of people’s minds.

Two more players will win the Triple Crown in 2012

We’re now verging on Season 9 of the EPT and Season 11 of the WPT, so with so many Champions and WSOP bracelet winners running around we’re going to start seeing a lot of Triple Crown winners in the upcoming years, the statistics say so!

There will be a major online poker scandal in 2012

When I say major scandal, I mean MAJOR scandal! With the industry in absolute limbo, and many sites in chaos, I have a strange feeling that even more dirty laundry from the online poker industry will be revealed than we had in 2011. My feeling is that something in the same ballpark as the Super-User scandal or Full Tilt Poker fiasco from last year will dominate the headlines in 2012.

Players will still be waiting for their Full Tilt money at the end of 2012

Sorry everyone, but with the length of time it’s taking to finalize the sale of the company I can’t imagine the Department of Justice paying back US players in a timely manner. I also have a sneaky suspicion that the payouts are not going to be 100%, with the DOJ disregarding everything from Full Tilt Poker Points and tournament tickets, to taxing past FTP transactions and withdrawals.

After deciding whether or not it will be worth it to jump through the many hoops the DOJ lays out, my guess is a number of poker players will simply decide to write-off their Full Tilt Poker accounts. By the end of 2012 I suspect only a small percentage of US players will have been repaid by Full Tilt Poker, the DOJ, or whoever owns the company or is responsible for the payouts.

Tags: Breeding Ground, Cold Spell, Crystal Ball, Dirty Laundry, EPT, Full tilt Poker, Online Poker, Poker Tournaments, Poker World, Prognostication, Sorry Everyone, Strange Feeling, Televised Poker, Triple Crown Winners, Turnouts, Utter Chaos, World Poker Tour, WPT, WSOP Main Event, Year of the Woman

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2012 at 10:28 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.