Probably one of the worst thing that could have happened to professional poker players was the popularization of poker that took place at the beginning of this century, as back then they had a lot of amateur poker players they could take advantage of, but now almost anyone that plays poker today has read a few books about it and it is way more difficult to beat them, and even the small stakes tables are filled with professional gamblers from all over the world that are more than happy to play poker and make some money each day.
"One that is constant in life is change" is a common saying in some parts of the world if not all, there is definitely no way poker was going to stay hidden for ever as to the extent that only very few persons will know how to play the game even unto this very 21st century, I can actually say that every game we play today that is of old had a time when only a few persons knew how to play it, and when the right time came, it broke out and alot of persons learnt how to play that game, this goes to show us that, nothing stays hidden any more like in the old days when there was no internet and all.
Nowadays, we have the internet, stuffs and things, information of anything can easily be sent out to the world easily through the use of the internet, which is to say that, nothing of value stays hidden for a long time anymore, all it takes is one person posting it on the internet, and it's gone viral.
Without a doubt things have changed, and while poker is way more popular than decades ago and the possibility of making more money than back then exist, the competition is so fierce now that even professional poker players are finding difficult to keep themselves profitable, as even if learning how to play poker as you should is difficult, there is a ceiling that once reached almost no one can go beyond it and they cannot improve their poker skills anymore.