Hope That Helps

Maybe once or twice a month I’ll take a peek at the stats and ponder over what searches led folks to stop by Hard-Boiled Poker.

Some keywords turn up pretty regularly. I’ll often have people who are looking for “169 hands” or “169 starting hands” (the number of different starters in hold’em) arrive at a post I wrote over two years ago in which I discussed what my first 50,000-plus hold’em hands looked like in PokerTracker (“169 Ways to Showdown”).

I am noticing that here lately seekers of information about Clonie Gowen keep finding a post from last year titled “Learn, Cheat, and Play Poker With the Pros.” That is the one where I talk a bit about an episode of Poker After Dark in which Gowen admits to having once scooped a pot even after she knew the deck had been fouled.

The recent 60 Minutes segment on the Absolute Poker/UltimateBet insider cheating scandals also drew a number of folks searching for further information, almost all of whom were focused on the UB part of the story. The most popular searches along those lines presently are “ultimate bet cheating,” “cheating on ultimate bet,” “ultimate bet poker cheating,” and “ultimate bet scandal.”

Oh, and there was one person apparently looking for information on “how to cheat on ultimate bet,” too. Clearly some are wantin’ to get in on that super-sounding super-user action!

Over the last few days, I’m seeing a number of folks looking for information about Stephan Kalhamer, co-author of that not-so-hot book with Chad Brown, Act to Win in Texas Hold’em Poker. I reviewed that book here back in August 2007, and I think my review may be one of the very few on the web as that post comes up first in searches of Kalhamer’s name. From what I can tell, Kalhamer continues to wield some influence in Germany as a well-known poker author, getting interviewed not too long ago in the German poker magazine Royal Flush. Indeed, appearances indicate that Act to Win was originally Kalhamer’s book (published in German), and when it was translated into English the publishers brought Chad Brown in to add a couple of brief passages and pose for the cover as “co-author.”

Have had a few hits for “sartre gambler” lately, from which search readers land on one of three posts I wrote back in May that were devoted to Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher -- most specifically looking at a short passage from Being and Nothingness in which Sartre uses the example of a gambler to make a point about existentialism. Here are those posts, if yr curious: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

There was one search from a day or two ago, though, that inspired me to share all of this today, a search which reminded me of what it was like when I first started to play online poker. Someone, somewhere, typed the following into a search box and as a result clicked on through to Hard-Boiled Poker:

“what does donk mean online poker talk”

Landed on a post titled “‘Nice catch, donk’” from early this year in which I related the story of a hand that ended with my opponent sending that message to me.

Do you remember the first time you were called a donk? Did you know what it meant? One of many, many poker-related terms, I suppose, that many of us learn the hard way.

I still remember the first time an opponent genuinely berated me in the chat box over a poor play-turned-lucky pot for me. It was at the penny PLO tables, and I’d only been playing for a week or two. Guy completely lost his mind when I’d chased my flopped two pair and backdoored a flush to pilfer a couple of dollars off of him (at most). (Now that I’ve gotten all of my old hand histories from PokerStars, I may have to go back and find that hand.)

As a brand new player, I was sincerely bothered by the unexpected dressing down, thinking perhaps I’d crossed some line of accepted behavior by my play. He didn’t use any terms that were unrecognizable to me. (I recall it was his typing “jesus christ” that signaled to me the dude was genuinely upset.) So I didn’t have to look online to see what I was being called.

In any event, I do hope my post was successful in demonstrating to the reader what the term actually means. I also hope that perhaps that reader might find his or her way back to the blog again someday.

Despite the fact that it appears the author might possibly be a donk.