As 2025 turns into 2026, we look back on the biggest stories that shaped the poker world in the last year.
If you're a creator in the poker world, or a regular consumer of one, there may have been no bigger story than the ongoing YouTube crackdown on content related to unregulated sites.
A year that started with growing prospects for content creators in the poker industry is ending with a lot of confusion, as overzealous algorithms and unintended consequences have tripped up some of poker's names.
When YouTube announced that March 19 would be a new day of enhanced rules for online gambling sites and the links that service them, some expected the damage to be limited to unregulated offshore sites and sweepstakes gaming.
"Under our existing policies relating to illegal or regulated goods or services, we don’t allow any method of directing viewers to gambling sites or applications that are not certified by Google," YouTube said at the time. "This now includes URLs, links embedded in images or text, visual displays (incl. logos) or verbal references."
'Enhanced' YouTube rules only enhance confusion
It seemed like a logical move, but a groundswell of confusion erupted a month later, on April 10, when content creators started to receive official messages from YouTube with age restrictions, demonetization, removals, and channel strikes on content both new and old.
Brad Owen had 30 videos age restricted incorrectly, but he was only successful on some of the subsequent appeals. The lack of clarity even extended to PokerOrg HQ, where Sarah Herring dealt with Shorts being flagged as '18 and over' – a process that requires an appeal to overturn. We took a deep dive on the problem in April:
Another storm kicked up for Owen in September when the 'Brad Owen Clips' channel suffered a full takedown, an ongoing issue for poker YouTubers who tried to toe the line. He would successfully overturn the ban on appeal, but the future remains uncertain for the growing group of players who need the platform to reach new audiences.
Negreanu sees drop in viewers
A short time later, seven-time WSOP champion Daniel Negreanu joined the chorus of frustrated players during his WSOP Online livestream series from Canada.
"YouTube truly has a clear objective to destroy poker content," Negreanu said on X. "I stream this series every year, but this year all the streams were age restricted from 10-15 minutes, which causes the algorithm to dwarf viewership. Roughly a 75% drop to the average viewership over two weeks."
The policies remain confusing as 2025 comes to a close, and players still suffer the appeals process when YouTube's automatic algorithm finds a false positive even among the most careful creators. Other options exist, but none near the level of visibility that YouTube provides. And it's not even about the monetization, Hristivoje 'All In Pav' Pavlovic says, which is very limited at this point.
“I make very, very little money from YouTube,” he told us in September. “It’s more about building the brand so you’re getting more eyes and more people coming to watch the stream. By the way, I stand for age restrictions – I don’t think kids should be watching gambling content.”
2026 is around the corner, and the powers that be are still pulling the levers that put pressure on poker.
Whether it's the anti-sweeps lobby, or the anti-gambling lobby, or the same people helping both, someone wants poker and the people who promote it to feel the heat. The very populous states of California and New York recently passed laws prohibiting sweeps gambling, and we'll find out if things calm down now with most of the hard work done.
