Moments of Inspiration

Was following the PokerStars blog last night. (By the way, I will be back on there before too long helping out with coverage of PokerStars’ Spring Championship of Online Poker [SCOOP] in April.)

Otis & Change100 are down in Uruguay covering the current Latin American Poker Tour stop. Before they get Day 1 of that sucker going today, they were finally playing out that tournament that had been interrupted back in December in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico.

You remember Dr. Pauly’s reports from that one. Local officials came in and stopped the proceedings with 89 players left, and they ended up paying out the prize pool according to chip stacks at the time play was interrupted. Stars then invited the 89 to play an online freeroll down to nine, then had those nine meet up again yesterday in Uruguay, with Stars throwing in an extra 50,000 berries for the final tablists.

Anyhow, once they had gotten down to heads up last night, the bloggers were describing how one player, a fellow named Rory Cox, had pushed all in on a J-8-4 board. Cox held middle pair -- K-8 -- and got called by his opponent, Helen Prager. Prager also had middle pair with 8-3, but Cox had her outkicked. Prager had Cox covered, so he needed to sweat the turn and river and hope a trey didn’t pop out in order to stay alive.

“Hold just one time,” pleaded Cox. That prompted our intrepid bloggers to pull out something with which I was previously unfamiliar -- the official PokerStars Blog One Time Chip™ (pictured above).

In this explanation (from the recent EPT Copenhagen stop), PS blogger Howard Swains gives his colleague, Stephen Bartley, credit for the idea. Having helped with the live blogging at last summer’s World Series of Poker (for PokerNews), I am somewhat familiar with how those long days can occasionally encourage such creative shenanigans among those reporting.

Pretty inspired, really, this here One Time Chip™. The idea is that rather than have to endure players calling out “one time!” over and over again, the player tosses out the chip and, if he or she survives the hand, the player cannot do so again. (Kind of reminds one of Staples’ “Easy Button.”)

Anyhow, the PokerStars Blog One Time Chip™ appears to have worked for Cox. His hand held up, and he went on to take the title.

Was trying to come up with some other, similar innovations, though since I’m almost entirely an online player, all of my ideas came from the game we play on the internets. I’m sure you folks who regularly play live could think of some other ones that more closely fit with the PokerStars Blog One Time Chip™ idea.

The best one I came up with would be a method of handling those who complain about the game being somehow rigged to cause them to lose -- the ones Bill Rini refers to as “rigtards.” This here ideer would be easy enough to implement, and in fact I’d bet Julius Goat, inventor of (among other things) the Donkavatar, could probably tell us how to do it.

How does it work? Simple. Whenever a player chimes in the chat box with a “so fking rigged” following a hand, one could right-click over his or her avatar and choose to adjust it accordingly: