The Infinitesimal Uptick of Online Poker

The World Series of Poker is up and running, and it has been diverting over the last day following the various discussions of how things have started. Overall the amount of WSOP talk seems a bit lower than in years past, but that’ll likely change soon once the Colossus comes along tomorrow.

Noticed a few “mainstream” articles about the WSOP starting this week -- e.g., it turned up as a top story in the Associated Press app. Saw another one on ESPN yesterday titled “Rise of online poker at the WSOP” filed by Dave Tuley that struck me as a little bit odd, actually.

ESPN, of course, has covered poker and especially the WSOP more than any other “non-poker” outlet over the last decade-plus, although as far as the website goes they’ve kind of curbed back the poker a bit this year. There’s no longer a separate “Poker” section on the site (formerly to be found along with other less popular sports). Now the poker is folded into a larger section about gambling, sports betting, and I guess some fantasy stuff called “Chalk.”

Anyhow, to get to what is a little strange about this article, we could start with the title, which makes it sound as though online poker is something that hasn’t already been around for more than 15 years. I mean the rise of online poker (at the WSOP and elsewhere) happened long ago. Even the fall of online poker (in the U.S.) is old news.

The piece is about WSOP.com’s Nevada site, focusing on how there will be an online bracelet event and also on the invitation to players to fire up the site and play on it on their phones, iPads, and laptops at the tables. You’ve probably heard a little about this and how dealers and staff are supposed to be accommodating to players wanting to multi-task like this.

Tuley talked with Bill Rini (WSOP.com’s Head of Online Poker) and 2012 WSOP Main Event champion Greg Merson (who is helping promote the site), both of whom are predictably energetic about it all. Indeed, much of the article is made from quotes from those two.

But while the author starts out acknowledging Chris Moneymaker’s online entry into the 2003 WSOP ME and vaguely refers to how “online poker has forever altered the gaming landscape,” he seems less aware of the fact that online poker has been heavily influencing the live game ever since.

“The convergence of the real and online worlds will never be more apparent than at the this year’s WSOP,” writes Tuley. I suppose he’s speaking literally -- as in he’s picturing that scene of players playing online poker on devices at the tables -- but even that has been a pretty commonplace sight around the world for many years.

He can’t be speaking figuratively, because anyone who’s paid any attention at all to poker over the last 15 years well knows how the “real and online worlds” (1) converged long ago, and (2) have converged in ways that have been way more apparent than will be the case at the WSOP this year.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how the online and live poker worlds work together,” he concludes, “but it’s clear they are intertwined and will continue to grow.” Again, the only way this empty observation even makes sense is on a literal level (e.g., will there be any hassle when players are waiting for the laptop player to act when it’s his turn?).

But even there just how “interesting” is that going to be? After all, even the author of “Rise of online poker at the WSOP” seems to be dozing a little with a sign-off like that.

Lock’s Stock in Peril

I continue to follow the worsening situation at Lock Poker which I wrote about last week. More details regarding the non-payouts, ever-shifting policies, Two Plus Two refusing their adverts, and various other dramas concerning sponsored players (and their perceived responsibility/culpability) continue to emerge every day.

For a good catch-up on the situation since last week, check out Haley Hintze’s most recent articles on Flushdraw regarding Lock: “Lock Poker Malaise Deepens as Trade Values Crash, More P2P Restrictions Allegedly Introduced” and “Monitoring the Lock Poker Spiral: The Shane Bridges Blowout.” (There’ll probably be more on Flushdraw to come.)

Also, Todd “DanDruff” Witteles’s thread-starting post (as “Kilowatt”) on Two Plus Two from Monday titled “Lock Shady Practices 101” provides another thorough summary of the situation up until a couple of days ago.

There are numerous, rapidly-growing threads on Two Plus Two regarding Lock. In some ways I’m surprised to see so much response, not because complaints aren’t warranted but because I hadn’t necessarily realized the site had earned so much traffic. It certainly seems that within the crippled U.S. online poker scene of the last two years, Lock had carved out a significant place.

And now with Lock’s final crash starting to appear imminent, there’s a certain canary-in-the-coalmine feeling that the whole “rogue” approach of small sites trying still to serve U.S. players is about to blow up once and for all.

I was intrigued a little this morning by a post from 2+2 moderator “SGT RJ” in the humorously-named “Lock Poker Crisis Containment Thread.” I say the name is funny because the thread -- begun less than a week ago -- is now approaching 1,400 posts.

In her post, SGT RJ offers some advice to posters as well as to those burdened with the unenviable task of trying to get funds off of Lock. She also makes a distinction between 2+2 posters and others who might have played on Lock. Or who, I suppose, might even be thinking of signing on and depositing on Lock.

“If you are knowledgable about poker in general, and frankly if you’re on 2p2 and following these mess of threads,” writes SGT RJ, “you’re probably more tuned into the poker world than 95% of the regular joes who play.”

She goes on to say “I think it’s part of our responsibility as poker players to not give business to owners and sites who have demonstrated, time and again, that they do not have the players’ best interests at heart.”

We circle back, once more, to that unavoidable conflict in poker, namely, the fact that it is a game based on self-interest that also requires cooperation among competitors in order to exist at all.

The idea of more informed players being “responsible” for the community as a whole in a situation like Lock is certainly more obvious to us post-Black Friday than it was before. I’m thinking back to Bill Rini’s provocative post from a while back titled “Who to Blame for Black Friday?” which I opined on here a bit in “Talking Black Friday and Blame.”

This notion that for online poker to work at all there has to be a sincere working together among all parties -- including a shared responsibility and trust -- is a new thing, I think, at least for those of us in the U.S. The tone of responses from players to Ultimate Poker’s first week of operation perhaps reflects this changed mindset, with many seeming to demonstrate patience and a willingness to remain hopeful and supportive of the site as it experiences various early growing pains.

In any case, I tend to agree with SGT RJ about players needing to avoid Lock if possible. And perhaps there’s a further need, too, for those who know about Lock’s problems to make an effort to publicize those issues to those who don’t (an idea reflected in the new “#LockPokerSucks” hashtag on Twitter).

The Mis-Lederer Files

So last Friday we finally reached the end of “The Lederer Files,” the lengthy interview with Howard Lederer posted in seven half-hour segments throughout the week by PokerNews.

To me the interview grew increasingly compelling as it went. Indeed, the process of watching successive “episodes” kind of reminded me of how a lot of us view new television programs, consuming entire seasons’ worth of shows in a single sitting or over the course of just a few days. I joked at one point over Twitter the sucker should have been put on Netflix streaming.

The forums and Twitter were of course all fired up over Lederer’s explanations, evasions, declarations, and obfuscations. A few detailed responses appeared as well on various sites and blogs, with Bill Rini’s breakdown of the interview (including some comments about Diamond Flush’s recent interview with Andy Bloch) being the most insightful by far.

In “A Review of The Lederer Files (Parts I-IV) and Andy Bloch Interview,” Rini assesses what Lederer and Bloch reveal about the ultimately inadequate management structure at FTP, including discussing at length about that incredible blind spot regarding the need to segregate accounts used for operating expenses and player funds that many of us were commenting on last week.

Then in “The Lederer Files Parts 5, 6, and 7” Rini looks a little more closely at the internal strife between the FTP owners and the issue of culpability. He rightly points out how Lederer utterly missed the point of Matt Glantz’ “The Silence of Full Tilt” blog post from February 2012. (Glantz wasn’t asking for a daily report on the status of deals and/or return of funds; he was noting the utter lack of any acknowledgement of the hugely effed-up situation.) Rini also ultimately finds Lederer’s interview-concluding apology to ring hollow, ultimately viewing the entire three-and-a-half-hour interview as much, much more self-serving than altruistic.

At the end of that second post, Rini offers some additional comments about Matthew Parvis and the quality of the interview as a whole. Parvis provided his own post-mortem on Saturday, also worth a look: “The Lederer Files: Process and Opinions.”

Sure, there were a few moments when follow-ups were warranted -- e.g., after that bizarre suggestion early on that segregating accounts wasn’t important to FTP or the industry as a whole; in the face of the non-explanation for why distributions continued at an obscenely high clip even after the company began to experience financial difficulty; during the self-righteous talk about the need to be fully “committed” as a member of FTP Board of Directors when Lederer himself was pretty obviously far from committed to his responsibilities as a BOD member prior to April 2011.

But like Rini I nonetheless have to acknowledge Parvis and PokerNews as having mostly done well with what was certainly a “tough gig” (as Rini says). And as I say above, I found the interview more compelling as it went, mostly because of the weird detours and occasional howlers Lederer dropped along the way.

His grouchy griping about Phil Ivey, John Juanda, Phil Gordon, Perry Friedman, and others was certainly intriguing, although in truth the more Lederer tried to deflect blame the worse he came off.

For example, the business with the “double-credited” loan to Erick Lindgren certainly appears primarily intended as a criticism of Lindgren for making off with not just a $2 million loan but another $2 million accidentally wired to him. But really, the whole idea of FTP casually shipping seven-figure loans to its Red Pros like this -- and amazingly being able to make multi-million-dollar mistakes in accounting when doing so (!) -- reflects incredibly badly on FTP and those who so recklessly ran the sucker.

If this were a television show, the dominant theme or motif of the “story arc” presented in these seven “episodes” would have to be the idea of being misled. On the surface, Lederer tries to argue over and again how he himself had been misled in various ways and in various contexts. But the audience cannot help but see the irony of his position as someone who contributed significantly (both by action and inaction) to the misleading of us all.

It sounds like Lederer may possibly return with still more interviews, and while more Lederer “episodes” -- or a second “season” -- might well provide some more gossipy nuggets to distract us, I’m not too hopeful anything more of substance will be forthcoming from the man who just a year-and-a-half ago was crowned the most powerful person in poker.

I was writing on Friday about quantity versus quality (referring to my chosen posting schedule). More is not necessarily better. While I’ll certainly be curious should further interviews take place, I’m kind of done with Lederer’s lecturing, as I think the “Professor” hasn’t really that much more to teach us.

That said, what an object lesson, eh?

Poker Turning the Page

Bill Rini offers us a good read today with a post titled “The Death of Poker Media?” There Bill comments at length about how poker publications like Card Player have clearly been affected significantly by Black Friday and the sudden down-sizing of online poker in the U.S. that happened in its wake.

Bill’s post reminded me of one I wrote last May titled “On Spines, or the Lack Thereof” in which I noticed how Card Player had swiftly reduced in size after losing PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and UltimateBet/Absolute Poker as advertisers.

In that post I remarked on how it had taken a few issues of Card Player for there to be any comment whatsoever on Black Friday, and when they finally did get around to mentioning it -- only briefly, in the issue dated May 24, 2011 -- it just so happened that was the issue in which the advertising from the indicted sites had stopped. (The fact that the new issue didn’t have a spine but was stapled together encouraged the pun in the title.)

Bill noted in his post that he’d picked up a recent issue of Card Player (dated January 25, 2012) and saw it was a mere 68 pages long, less than half of which contained actual content (i.e., features, strategy articles, etc.). In fact, that issue from last May -- the first one without a spine -- was also just 68 pages, so CP in particular has been scaled down for quite a while.

Having also noticed how the content being provided had slowed to a trickle, it was late last year I finally let my subscription to Card Player run out after many years. Actually the slimming down of the magazine had been happening pretty much over that entire stretch, starting with the signing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.

I still have all of my old issues of CP and so can quickly confirm what Bill is noting in his post about the lack of heft in the new Card Player compared to the good old days. The first issue of 2006 was 164 pages long, more than twice the number of pages of today’s Card Player. And observing the number of pages in the first issue of each year since further reveals the trend: 2007 (156 pages), 2008 (148), 2009 (112), 2010 (100), and 2011 (84).

Other poker-related print publications are struggling, too, of course, and Bill does a good job outlining how too great of a reliance on online sites’ ad revenue and the affiliate game help explain a lot of the wasting away that has occurred. As Bill points out, all poker media outlets are necessarily having to adapt to new circumstances in order to survive, let alone thrive.

I don’t think poker media’s “death” is necessarily imminent, although the future of print publications is understandably highly uncertain. Such is the case for much of print media, generally speaking.

Still, it is interesting to consider how the physicality of the magazines covering our favorite game -- not even their content, but how they feel in our hands -- can be said to provide a kind of literal marker of the game’s currently embattled status.

The Perils of Learning As You Go

I’ve written here before about David Hayano’s 1982 book Poker Faces: The Life and Work of Professional Card Players. It’s an anthropological study of professional poker players (of many different varieties) who populated California card rooms during the 1970s and early 1980s.

While the book’s conclusions regarding that particular generation of players are dated in some respects -- having been drawn well before the “boom” and the full-blown revolution that followed -- there remain a number of relatively timeless observations and insights that still readily apply to poker players today.

For a detailed overview of what Hayano covers in Poker Faces, click here to see that earlier post. Today I just wanted to share one observation Hayano makes early on in his study, something I came across earlier this week while rereading. Something about this particular point Hayano makes resonated a little differently with me when I read it this time.

The point comes up in a section titled “Background to a Gambling Career,” a short prelude to the categorization of different types of professionals Hayano subsequently makes. Here Hayano talks about how frequently those who become full-time pros often do so by happenstance, sort of “falling” into the profession after perhaps growing up with the game and experiencing some success during early trials as an adult.

There are a few early “catalysts” -- “adolescent gambling,” “work dissatisfaction,” and a wish for the “freedom to control their own time and money” among them -- that often characterize those who become full-time players. But in most cases, Hayano notes, there isn’t really any sort of formal decision or plan to become a pro. It just kind of happens.

To put it in the anthropologist’s terms, somewhere along the way the pros “have self-socialized themselves into full-time playing with little outside help and almost no deliberate anticipatory socialization.”

That was the observation that struck me this time around, this idea that people who become full-time players generally do so without a lot of forethought, without a lot of guidance, and without a lot of formal “training” or the kind of apprenticeship that characterizes many other professions. And perhaps unsurprisingly, many find themselves struggling down the road when subsequently faced with situations for which they are necessarily ill-prepared.

This is one of those ideas Hayano advances in his study that I think still applies more or less today. And I guess when I think about the utter mess online poker has now become in the U.S., highlighted of late by the Full Tilt Poker fiasco, it is interesting to think about the role played by the pros who started that company. And how it was probably the case for many of them that they hadn’t any real preparation for managing their own lives as professional players, let alone other entrepreneurial ventures such as creating and running an online poker site.

Bill Rini wrote an insightful post yesterday exploring in particular “How Things Became So Screwed Up At Full Tilt Poker.” He speculated some about how it happened that a bunch of smart folks (in his opinion) allowed things to go as wrong as they did there. As he notes near the conclusion, he doubts those who ran FTP “specifically set out to defraud anybody of their money,” adding “it just doesn’t fit with their personalities.”

But it appears that’s just what they ended up doing. (Like Bill, I'll acknowledge the “alleged” qualifier here.) And while doing so perhaps didn’t fit with their personalities, it does kind of fit with the idea Hayano presents of poker pros often having to learn as they go -- a kind of modus operandi that often characterizes the early stages of their playing careers, the self-tutelage required to manage their professions afterwards, and beyond.

Talking Black Friday & Blame

Today I wanted to draw your attention to two thought-provoking posts, both on the subject of Black Friday. Readers of this blog might’ve already encountered one or both by now, but I thought I’d recommend them nonetheless.

One was by Bill Rini, titled “Who to Blame for Black Friday?” As someone with extensive experience within the online poker industry, Rini routinely provides insightful commentary on it whenever he chooses to address the subject. I sometimes think the fact that Rini now resides in Thailand also perhaps lends him a better perspective on certain aspects of the industry, enabling him to see things that we here in the U.S. aren’t able to grasp quite so easily.

Those who listened to QuadJacks during their marathon broadcasts in the wake of BF might recall Rini occasionally appearing to share his thoughts. He came on the Two Plus Two Pokercast once or twice in there, too.

To me, Rini’s post offered a clear and persuasive account of how the industry as a whole tended to operate over the preceding decade, his primary argument being that pretty much everyone -- those who ran the sites, those who played on them, and those who reported on them as well -- could be said to share in the “blame” for allowing online poker to evolve into such a thoroughly corrupt and poorly-managed industry.

The other post I wanted to recommend was a response to Rini’s, penned yesterday by PokerLawyer. Speaking from the perspective of a player -- or “consumer” -- she offers a countering view to the one suggesting that she was to “blame” for the sites’ owners and others being indicted, for the civil complaint, or for any of the other unfortunate fallout from Black Friday.

If you check out PokerLawyer’s post -- titled “Responsible for Black Friday... who me?!” -- you’ll see in the comments how I responded by explaining how I identified with PokerLawyer’s “who me?” response but I also found Rini’s suggestion that we players became overly complacent with an obviously sketchy industry to ring true. (I might well have saved that comment for a post of my own here, but didn’t.)

Rini also added a thoughtful response, and PokerLawyer followed up as well. There is some interesting back-and-forthing going on in the comments to Rini’s post, too. If you’re interested in exploring this issue of how Black Friday came to be -- and where we as players may or may not have fit in -- both posts and the subsequent discussions are probably worth checking out.

Definitely intriguing to look back and see the past differently like this. And while assigning “blame” for Black Friday might be considered a mostly academic exercise at this point, it’s still worthwhile, I think, as we try to envision the future -- most particularly one that might include a new-from-the-ground-up online poker industry in the U.S.

The “Boom” Eight Years Later

Saw a tweet from Bill Rini this morning reminding us all that today marks the eight-year anniversary of Chris Moneymaker’s World Series of Poker Main Event win back in 2003.

Yeah, I know. Eight years?!

At that time, the World Poker Tour was already on the air over on the Travel Channel, having debuted almost two months before. (Some time ago I wrote a little about the WPT’s debut here.) And really it wouldn’t be until later in the summer when ESPN aired its coverage of the 2003 WSOP ME in seven weekly installments in July and August that the “boom” truly ignited. At least that is how I remember it.

As we all know, Moneymaker -- playing as “Money800” -- won his $10,000 entry fee into the 2003 WSOP ME via a $39 satellite on PokerStars, the site for which he’d subsequently become a foremost representative.

You might have heard about this new documentary, BOOM: The Incredible True Story of Online Poker, currently in the works and scheduled for a 2012 release. It is an incredible true story. Will be especially challenging to tell it in just a couple of hours, too, I imagine.

That title, of course, is connected to Moneymaker’s triumph, a moment that brought together the truly awesome forces of Moneymaker’s everyman story (and convenient name), televised poker (newly energized by hole card cams), and the burgeoning industry of online poker.

It just so happens the first trailer for BOOM came out over the weekend, and it begins with Moneymaker’s magical moment. Check it out:



The trailer -- which I suppose represents an abridged version of the planned-for narrative of the film -- ends with Black Friday, a suitably dramatic twist to the story (and, perhaps, another possible meaning for the title). Here is the Facebook page for the film, for those of you who do the Facebook thing.

As it happens, I’ll be spending part of today’s anniversary following the Main Events of Stars’ Spring Championship of Online Poker. The three versions of the SCOOP Main Event attracted a total of almost 20,000 entrants (19,667) with the prize pools for all three adding up to nearly $8 million ($7,983,200). Interestingly, that total is almost the same as the prize pool for the 2003 Main Event ($7,802,700).

Looking back, eight of the nine players who made the final table at the 2003 WSOP Main Event were American, with sixth-place finisher Amir Vahedi of Iran the only exception. And 48 of the 63 players who cashed that year were from the U.S., too. Goes without saying that none of those cashing in the SCOOP Main Events or making today’s final tables will be American. Even Moneymaker, as a U.S. resident, has been precluded from participating.

By the way, Moneymaker’s colleague, Aussie Joe Hachem, the 2005 WSOP ME Champ about whom I was writing on Friday, is one of the final 22 in the “High” version of the Main Event, the one with an even bigger buy-in ($10,300) than the WSOP ME. (Worth noting, though, that recent scuttlebutt suggests online poker players in Australia may soon be encountering some difficulty, too.)

Seems like such a long, long time ago, the day Moneymaker won that last hand off of Sammy Farha. I was asked recently to try to picture what poker would be like ten years from now in 2021. I basically dodged the question, inviting the interviewer to think back ten years ago and consider how hard it would’ve been to predict the path poker took to 2011.

In that interview -- appearing over on CheckRaze -- I also admitted that while I always played cards, it really wasn’t until 2003 and after the “boom” that I got caught up in poker in a serious way. I can still remember watching ESPN that summer, like many being fairly well spellbound by what I was seeing.

Who knew how much the events of May 23, 2003 would affect the lives of so many of us? I sure didn’t.

The Hustler, the DOJ, and Online Poker in the U.S.

A couple of months ago I wrote a short post about The Hustler, the great 1961 film starring Paul Newman in which the game is pool, but many of the lessons apply directly to poker. Such was David Spanier’s evaluation in his chapter on poker movies in Total Poker. The PokerGrump spelled out some of the ways the film applies to poker, too, in a post from a while back.

I was reading through various posts and articles over the last couple of days concerning “Black Friday,” including the several written by Bill Rini, one of a few especially lucid commentators on the situation. One of Bill’s posts caused me to think again of a particular sequence in The Hustler.

The scene comes a little over halfway through the movie. Eddie enters Arthur’s Pool Hall, a place where no one knows of his skills as a player. He plays a few friendly games for low stakes. Soon the other players all drop out, leaving just Eddie and the player who is presumably the best Arthur’s Pool Hall has to offer. Eddie is asked if he’d like to raise the stakes, he responds with a jokey comment (“I think maybe you’re a hustler”), and they continue playing at slightly bigger stakes.

Eddie’s opponent wins a match -- Eddie is clearly letting him do so -- and afterwards decides to needle our hero a little. “You sure you don’t want to quit, friend?” he asks. Eddie turns serious. “Let’s cut out the small stuff, huh?” he says, then proposes they play 10 matches for $100 -- a significant jump in stakes. His opponent delivers another dig just before they begin, and Eddie responds angrily.

“I don’t rattle, kid!” he fires back with a menacing look. “Just for that I’m going to beat you flat!”

Eddie proceeds to win the next 10 matches in rapid fashion, not letting his opponent have a single shot. He then tells the “two-bit punk” to pay up. His opponent leaves the money, but also leaves Eddie alone with the other locals, none too pleased at Eddie’s display.

“We got no use for pool sharks around here,” one says. Then they proceed to take the money back and rough him up, including breaking both of his thumbs.

The lesson -- as PokerGrump points out -- is to show some reserve when beating an inferior player. When you win, keep quiet, or practice a kind of faux humility about it. Don’t trash talk. Don’t “tap the glass” and scare the fish away. You’re only increasing the likelihood that your opponent won’t want to play anymore, and then there’s no game.

Eddie won a lot, couldn’t resist becoming very showy and arrogant about it, and suddenly found himself out of the game entirely.

The post from Bill that caused me to think about this scene from The Hustler was one titled “Why Bodog Wasn’t Kicked Out of the U.S.” I was intrigued to read what he had to say, not least because I still have an account on Bodog. That account is presently empty, however, and so I have found myself thinking off and on about perhaps trying to put some dollars back in and play once more.

“Will the DOJ come after Bodog or any of the other sites still offering U.S. gaming?” asks Bill. “Probably if they get too big,” is his answer. “Right now they’re small fish. If any significant U.S. traffic starts over there then they’ll come up on the crosshairs.”

Thus, Bill goes onto explain, the processing of transactions will become more and more difficult for Bodog should their traffic increase significantly. Then they’ll find themselves in a similar position PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and UB/AP did before they apparently resorted to non-legal machinations to get money to and from players.

Should I try to play on Bodog then? The fact is, I had stopped playing there over a year ago because the traffic had grown too slow. And it sounds like if the traffic were to increase, the likelihood that the site would become the next DOJ target would increase, too. Not encouraging.

Eddie’s showy play and subsequent punishment might be compared to how PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker had become so huge and successful, and prominent, too, via constant advertisements on the web and our TV screens, that their status as “sharks” could no longer be ignored. And recent developments on the legislative front regarding online poker and those alliances with casinos (discussed in that “Some Rambling About the Rumble” post from 4/8/11) only served to increase the the sites’ stature further.

As I. Nelson Rose has pointed out, when we consider the Department of Justice’s decision to pounce, “the timing is suspicious.” He sees the decision to act now as having been directly motivated by the increasingly loud “rumble” that had been created by the online site-casino alliances (e.g., Wynn and PokerStars) and the momentum being gathered behind the various legislative pushes to license and regulate online poker in the U.S.

As Rose points out, the DOJ has been “waging a war of intimidation against Internet gambling for years, successfully scaring players, operators, payment processors and affiliates into abandoning the American market.” To keep an upper hand in this war, they couldn’t wait any longer, allowing legislation to pass or the sites to grow even stronger via various business alliances in the U.S.

In other words, like the locals at Arthur’s Pool Hall, the DOJ had seen the sites run the table -- and perhaps be a bit showy about it as they did -- and decided they couldn’t just sit back and watch.

You could say that part of what has happened here is the DOJ viewed the sites as having thumbed their noses at them for too long.

So they broke some thumbs.

2010 WSOP, Day 33: Games People Play

Was off yesterday, and spent the day doing a lot of nothing. Slept off and on all day. Still feel a little tired this morning, but I know once I return to the Rio this afternoon, I’ll be fully charged and ready to go.

I mean, it is the World Series of Poker.

During my waking hours yesterday, I did check in on PokerNews’ live reporting now and then. Was in particular following that Event No. 47 (the $1,000 no-limit hold’em event), the final table for which I’ll be helping cover later today. Early reports were they were going to play that one all of the way through yesterday (in which case I might possibly have had a second day off), but by early evening they changed that plan.

Followed some of the silliness on Twitter yesterday, including Barry Greenstein’s accidental tweeting of direct messages in which he broadcasted to the world details of how much he’s stuck this summer and backing arrangements. (Dr. Pauly fills in a few details on that one, if yr curious.)

Speaking of Twitter, I also noticed that Daniel Negreanu had the day off yesterday, too, and that he spent some of his day firing off tweets about Rocky movies and (once again) chip counts.

Negreanu also found time to write a blog post yesterday, at the end of which he comments briefly about “the whole twitter thing.” He concludes by noting that “Drama Queens often use twitter to. . . well, create some drama!” and adds that some of the ways Twitter is used “can be destructive or just a plain waste of time.”

Kid Poker more insightful there than he realizes, I think.

I additionally had some time yesterday to catch up on some blog reading. Among the items I read was Bill Rini’s piece from a couple of weeks ago titled “What the World Series of Poker Means to Me” in which he criticizes how the Series is set up and covered.

Rini begins by characterizing the WSOP as a whole as “contrived” and suggesting those here reporting on it are “all trying to make something out of what is usually nothing.” “The vast majority of events during the WSOP are barely even newsworthy,” he continues, then fills out the rest of the piece with a catalogue of “predictable outcomes” (i.e., articles) one often finds coming out of the Rio this time of year.

Rini brings up some good points about how the Series has too many events and thus tends to yield a lot of redundant-seeming reporting that lacks true inspiration. I don’t perfectly agree with all of the gripes that appear in his catalogue, but I think I understand where he’s coming from with each.

The WSOP is too long. Punishingly so, for all involved. As Tom Schneider told me last year, “It's like flying to Australia every day. Only when you get there you're at the Rio. Again.” And sure, there’s a lot that is wrong with the “system” (as Rini puts it) in which those of us reporting on it find ourselves forced to operate.

But really, can’t we just enjoy it a little bit? Why must the WSOP constantly be surrounded by so much negativity and criticism -- about seemingly everything?

Today I will be watching and reporting on nine players who entered a $1,000 buy-in poker tournament. These nine survived a total field of 3,128, and now the winner will earn almost half a million dollars. A couple of the players are known by some in poker, but for the most part all are relatively obscure figures. In the grand scheme of things, anyway.

Will it be “newsworthy”? I happen to think so. But I realize many -- even those who love poker and invest a lot of time and energy thinking about what the WSOP means to them -- might not feel the same way.

But so what? It’s a game, and games are fun. And poker is especially fun, a kind of game that allows for the expression of personality, for narratives to develop, for surprise and suspense, for all sorts of outcomes that are anything but predictable.

So back I go. Yeah, I’ve seen other tourneys, other final tables. But I want to see how this one turns out.

Poker and the English Language

I occasionally talk here about how impatient I sometimes get with poker-related analogies. For instance, about a year ago I referred to the Poker Shrink noting how he wasn’t “a big fan of the ‘Poker is like Life’ books and articles” because, in his view, most of them end up being “too general to carry any more wisdom than a dribble glass.” I agreed with the Shrink in saying I also didn’t care much for these analogies -- most particularly when they end up making one’s meaning more vague rather than helping clarify what it is one is trying to express.

In other words, I ain’t too keen on someone proclaiming “Poker is like life” and leaving it at that, though I do often appreciate the many ways poker presents us with situations that resemble those we face elsewhere, and thus occasionally provides interesting ways to talk about and assess those non-poker situations. And yeah, I, too, will indulge in such making comparisons now and again, as it is both fun and occasionally even useful.

That said, one has to be careful not to introduce unwanted vagueness when making such comparisons. Another danger one faces when choosing to employ poker-related metaphors is to fall into stale, overused phrases and clichés -- also not recommended if the goal is to engage an audience.

The abundance of poker terms and phrases in everyday English is testament to the game’s popularity and significance. But this abundance also means many of these terms and phrases have become pretty well worn by now. People everywhere are constantly bluffing each other. Or upping the ante. Or noting when the chips are down. Or passing the buck. Or trying their hand at something. Or singing that he can’t read my, can’t read my, no he can’t read my poker face. Or warning you about that guy being a wild card, with an ace in the hole. Or up his sleeve. Or simply being an ace.

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s still relevant 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” in which he laments the decline of the language in various contexts, but most especially in political speech and writing. Among his many warnings listed there, Orwell advises readers to avoid “dying metaphors” if at all possible. In his list of examples Orwell does include one poker-related one -- “playing into the hands of” -- and I’d imagine he’d list most of those appearing in the previous paragraph, too, as often introducing an unwanted “loss of vividness” in one’s language.

Last week Tiffany Michelle appeared on Fox News to chat with Neil Cavuto, ostensibly to discuss the current status of President Obama’s efforts to introduce health care reform and all of the legislative tangling -- and political fallout -- that has occurred in connection to those efforts thus far. Why Michelle? Well, because she’s “a professional black jack and poker player” -- i.e., a gambler -- and someone thought it would be a good idea for a person who understands risks and rewards to comment.

Bill Rini wrote a bit about the segment last week in a post that also has the embedded video. Then he came back and transcribed the whole sucker. As Rini points out, the conversation between Cavuto and Michelle -- coming in at just under five minutes -- is more than a little cringe-worthy, primarily because of the not terribly successful attempt to describe everything in terms of poker or gambling metaphors.

It appears that Cavuto (and Fox) mainly wanted to say that Obama has “a bad hand” here and should fold. And perhaps -- as Cavuto hastily adds at the end -- also to charge that the President isn’t playing with his own money, but with the taxpayers’. So they brought Michelle on to help communicate that message, but Cavuto’s questions were so imprecise those (essentially banal) observations barely came through, if at all.

If you’re curious, check out Rini’s transcript and/or watch the video. I actually wouldn’t fault Michelle too much here -- she does pretty well, I think, to try to respond to Cavuto’s garbled clichés, and in fact probably saves the whole segment from becoming utterly inscrutable.

The hosts of The Poker Beat discussed the segment a bit on their show last week, and there tourney reporter B.J. Nemeth did a good job summarizing why it failed -- and why I am sometimes impatient with poker-related metaphors that tend to obscure more than clarify. “The whole point of an analogy is to try and make something easier to understand,” said Nemeth, “and I think what they did is took something the [viewers] had some grasp of and made it incomprehensible.”

Then again, as Orwell notes, what Nemeth is describing is often what happens when language is employed for political purposes. Writing in the wake of the second World War, Orwell notes how “Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Perhaps the stakes were a bit higher then (to use a dying metaphor). But Orwell’s desire for us to view “language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought” is still worth reiterating.

The North American Poker Tour Debuts (The Return of PokerStars-vs.-PartyPoker?)

Am following with interest the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure play out down in Nassau. Checking in on PokerNews’ live reporting as well as the PokerStars blog for all the latest.

Sounds like over 1,500 runners sat down for the two Day Ones, a new record for the PCA. Of course, yesterday the big news coming out of the Bahamas was how the PCA is in fact the first event of the new North American Poker Tour (NAPT). The tour’s next stop will be in Las Vegas in February at the Venetian, then over to the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut in April. Oh, and it sounds like ESPN might be shooting these NAPT final tables for broadcast, a not-insignificant part of the story.

Our buddy B.J. Nemeth has written some about the new NAPT and its challenge to the World Poker Tour (for which Nemeth does live reporting). Check out Nemeth’s post “NAPT vs. WPT: The Battle for North America” for some of his thoughts on the subject. As Nemeth notes, that next NAPT event at the Venetian will compete with the WPT’s L.A. Poker Classic in February, so we’ll see right away how the first round of this here fight will go.

Nemeth also alludes in his post to the purchase of World Poker Tour Enterprises by PartyGaming from last year, which reminds me that I had wanted to write a little something on that story again here.

I wrote a couple of those “top ten” lists at the end of 2009 -- one compiling the top stories of the year and another listing the top moments of the decade. Such lists are more difficult to pull together than they appear, especially if one is trying to rank the items against one another in some fashion. They’re certainly fun, though, as debate starters. Hell, I immediately felt like challenging my own choices as soon as I made them.

There were at least a couple of stories from 2009 I had considered including in my “Top Poker Stories of 2009” list but ended up leaving out. One was Daniel Negreanu having passed Jamie Gold as the all-time tournament money winner, thanks to the Canadian’s runner-up finish at the 2009 WSOPE Main Event. (Phil Ivey would pass Gold as well following his seventh-place finish at the WSOP.)

Another story I had in the list for a while but then ultimately dropped was the one regarding the purchase of World Poker Tour Enterprises by PartyGaming back in late August 2009. I know several others kept this one in their top ten stories lists for 2009, but I ended up deciding that for the average poker player or fan it hadn’t really registered all that much. I could certainly see, though, how some might view this “insider”-type story as having real some importance down the road.

The news of Party’s purchase of WPTE came not long after we’d heard a story that WPTE had been sold to a group called Gamynia Limited (for $9.075 million). Then Peerless Media Ltd., a division of PartyGaming, came along with a better offer and was able to buy the WPTE for $12.3 million. Steve Lipscomb, WPTE’s President and CEO, noted at the time how he looked forward to PartyGaming being able “to provide a strong vehicle for the WPT brand to continue its global expansion and return to online gaming.”

I did write a little something about the purchase here at the time, noting both the relatively small price tag and how it seemed kind of interesting how the fate of poker no longer seemed all that closely tied to the livelihood of the WPT. Such wouldn’t have been the case just a couple of years before, but in 2009, with the European Poker Tour and a host of other tours thriving all over the globe, the fortunes of the fading WPT just didn’t seem as crucial, big picture-wise.

The reason why the purchase -- which includes Party getting the WPT branding rights -- is viewed by some as a potentially big story is tied to the possibility that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 could get either overturned or pushed out by new legislation to license and regulate online gambling in the United States. It is thought that by purchasing the WPT brand, PartyPoker will have themselves a handy “vehicle” with which to reenter the U.S. market.

Seems like a lot has to happen, though, for that sequence ever to play out in quite that way. Someone who knows a lot more about these things than I do, Bill Rini, offered some thoughts on the story as well back in August. Rini outlines some of the difficulties Party might face when it comes to returning to the U.S., with or without the WPT brand as a kind of protective shield. Not at all a sure thing, it seems, but perhaps we’ll see.

Going back to Nemeth’s post, the new NAPT -- sponsored by PokerStars -- now means we have kind of a “PartyPoker-vs.-PokerStars” thing happening again here in the U.S. in the form of these competing tours. Kind of recalls what our little world of online poker was like when I first started this blog in the spring of 2006, back when Party & Stars were the big dogs in the U.S. (with Full Tilt just starting to yap at their heels). Will be very interesting to watch how it all plays out, and, of course, what effect the UIGEA getting overturned and/or bumped by new legislation could have on the competition.

If you’re interested in more on this “insider”-type stuff, I’d suggest listening to some of our fave industry insiders over on The Poker Beat, who return this afternoon (I believe) with a new episode.

Hot and Cold

Was playing over on PokerStars yesterday afternoon when the site suddenly became inordinately sluggish. Eventually a message popped up in the chat box saying the site was experiencing “internet routing problems.”

At the time, I was at a six-handed pot-limit Omaha table. I’d started the session well, nearly doubling my buy-in early on after drawing out a straight to beat a player’s flopped set. After that hand, my opponent, MisterBlister, had rebought and I could tell he was angling to get into another big confrontation with me, but no opportunities had arisen for that to happen. At some point before the slowdown began to occur, the other players had left one by one, leaving just me and MisterBlister.

I have gotten into the habit of sticking around whenever that happens, as I generally feel pretty comfortable with heads-up play, whereas I suspect a lot of players of ring games tend not to prefer to play against a lone opponent. We rapidly traded small pots, and I could sense my revenge-seeking opponent was burning to find some hand with which to create a bigger pot. From my perspective, it was shaping up to be a good trapping opportunity, and so I, too, was lying in wait, hoping to pounce on an overeager opponent.

But then the slowdown started, made all the more noticeable because we were heads-up. Eventually it was taking a half-minute or more for the next hand to be dealt, and after we acknowledged to one another in the chat box that the site had indeed slowed, MisterBlister and I left, perhaps to renew our battle some other day.

Made me think a little about “hot” and “cold” players or play -- that is to say, the way some players sometimes appear to us as either desirous for action and thus more willing to take risks than most (“hot”) or purposefully avoiding conflict and especially risk averse (“cold”).

Players can distinguish themselves these ways quite dramatically in PLO -- perhaps more obviously so than in hold’em. There are those who “heat up” and start betting pot again and again, regardless of position or holdings. Then there are those who seem almost frozen, afraid ever to raise preflop under any circumstances, check-calling big flopped hands, etc. I even saw a dude check behind with quads the other day on a double-paired board -- no shinola!

Anyhow, MisterBlister certainly seemed “hot” to me -- and perhaps I did to him, too -- but we both cooled off quickly when the site began slowing down.

I noted just at the start of the slowdown that the site had about 195,000 total players (including play money), and marveled to see that figure dip down to 90,000 within just a few minutes. Soon, however, Stars corrected the problem and just like that was back up over 200,000 players. I ended up tripping over to Full Tilt Poker where I played another short session before signing off. Realized I am probably playing about 90% of the time on PokerStars these days, only looking to take a seat elsewhere when something like yesterday’s glitch occurs.

Glancing over at PokerScout, I see Stars continues to be the most popular site by a significant margin. In its tracking of real money ring game players, the site lists PokerStars as having averaged 26,000 cash game players over the last week. Full Tilt is next with 15,400, followed by three sites/networks that are not available to Americans, the iPoker Network (5,600), PartyPoker (5,300), and the Ongame Network (2,850).

Looking at other sites that are available to us Yanks, the Cereus Network (Absolute Poker and UltimateBet) is in sixth place (2,550), Cake Poker is in 10th (1,840), and Bodog has slipped to 14th (averaging just 890 cash players over the last week).

Pretty simple to see why I’m always on PokerStars -- it is definitely the “hot” site right now, while the others (especially Bodog) have turned relatively “cold.” Always plenty of six-handed PLO25 tables for me to join at Stars, whereas Bodog often only has one or two going, if that.

Of course -- as Bill Rini noted last month in a post titled “Is Online Poker Really Doing Well?” -- it is easy to get carried away with looking at the numbers of players, a figure which he says doesn’t necessarily tell us much at all about the overall health of a given site. Rini discusses this trend in which the “big keep getting bigger and the small get smaller,” but also notes how being bigger doesn’t always mean becoming more profitable. Despite rising numbers on certain sites, the industry as a whole isn’t necessarily thriving these days, says Rini. (Check out his post for some of the reasons why he thinks this is so.)

Meanwhile, we Americans look with trepidation at the calendar as December 1 draws closer, the day that “designated financial systems” must begin complying with those finalized regulations of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. (Which, incidentally, then-President Bush signed into law exactly three years ago today.)

And hoping something happens to prevent the possible slowdown that might follow as the games (potentially) go “cold.”

A Sticky Issue

Yesterday I read Bill Rini’s post in which he passed along some inside dope from Two Plus Two regarding strategy posts and “Grand Poobah” Mason Malmuth’s worry that the forums are negatively affecting the company’s book sales. If you didn’t happen to catch Bill’s post, here’s the skinny:

Back in May, 2+2 author Ed Miller put up a post on his popular “Noted Poker Authority” site announcing that “for the last nine months” he had been “receiving pressure and threats aimed at forcing me either to shut down Noted Poker Authority or to make the vast majority of its content available for pay only.” The upshot was that articles older than 30 days would no longer be accessible for free. Am not quite sure how the new system works or what the cost to view the older articles happens to be, but I do see that now one has to login in to see the older articles (such as that nice “shout out” Ed gave me back in January).

In any event, earlier this week Malmuth posted a message -- titled “Some Stickies Need to Be Modified” -- for the 2+2 moderators that begins with an allusion to Miller’s site. This message was apparently not intended to be seen by anyone other than the moderators, but a leak somewhere caused the message to be made public.

“Many of you are not going to like this,” Malmuth begins, “but we have had a terrible time with one of our authors creating a website with so much information on it that it was clearly going to destroy book sales.” 2+2 “is first and foremost a publishing company,” Malmuth points out, and apparently he has concluded that “many of our stickies are similar” in the way they deter readers from buying the company’s books.

The 2+2 forums work like most in that the most recent and most popular threads appear at the top of each individual forum. Forum moderators will create a “sticky” post whenever a particularly important topic comes up that needs to continue to appear at the top of the forum and not be pushed downward when newer threads are begun. For instance, in “News, Views, and Gossip” one finds a “UB scandal sticky” atop the page where many links to relevant posts/threads have been organized for readers’ convenience.

Some of the strategy-based forums had also begun collecting links to some of the best-received strategy posts into “stickies” for the same purpose -- i.e., to make life easier for the reader hoping to find these posts amid the hundreds of thousands that have been created since the site began back in 1997. (Actually, I’m not sure the site’s archival system currently allows one read posts from that far back, but you get the idea.)

In Malmuth’s note, he recognizes that while the site “contains a lot of quality information,” such information is a bit difficult to track down since it isn’t “readily accessible and well organized.” And what he’s noticed is “the stickies are doing just that,” that is, organizing the information in ways that make it easier for readers to access it. “Having links to lots of top quality posts may be serving as a substitute for book purchases,” worries Malmuth, so he is asking the moderators “to look at the stickies in your areas and consider deleting some of the links that can substitute for book purchases.”

My initial reaction to hearing this story was to chuckle at how a website’s owner can arrive at the conclusion that making his site less user-friendly is somehow in the site’s best interest. Malmuth and 2+2 have always been stubbornly iconoclastic (to their detriment, frankly) when it comes to all phases of book publishing -- from writing and editing to promotion and distribution -- so it isn’t at all surprising to see such a strange, backwards-seeming understanding of the relationship between different types of media (print and electronic) emerge from the same source.

I then recalled that little brouhaha that came up last December regarding an allegedly plagiarized passage appearing in Seven Card Stud for Advanced Players, a book co-authored by Malmuth and David Sklansky. I wrote a lengthy post about the dust-up then; you can read more about it there, if yr curious.

That little dust-up concerned a sample hand appearing in the pair’s book that was essentially identical to one that comes up in Chip Reese’s stud section of Super/System (published over a decade before). The similarity caused some to suggest the pair had stolen the material from Reese. As I said then, it appeared to me a fairly innocent slip on the part of the authors, though the pair’s mule-headed responses to the matter (in the 2+2 forums) revealed what I then described as a overly “functional view of style” wherein Malmuth and Sklansky both insist on quantifying things that simply cannot be quantified. Let me explain.

Defending himself against the charge of plagiarism, Sklansky posted the following dismissive comment on what happened: “But duh. Cmon. How easy would it have been for me to come up with a completely different example to perfectly describe the exact same concept? To ascribe this to anything other than an oversight is completely ridiculous. Chip’s chapter was very good but it was 50 pages. Our book has 300.”

That reference to the amount of pages at the end -- our book was six times longer than Reese’s section, chirps Sklansky, suggesting somehow it is six times more valuable -- is indicative of that tendency to overvalue quantity. But it is the idea that he could’ve picked a different example to illustrate the same concept -- and that making that sort of change would’ve somehow made the passage acceptable (and not plagiarism) -- that reveals an utter misunderstanding of the importance of form and its relation to content. And I think Malmuth’s directive to his moderators comes from the same sort of misapprehension about form and content Sklansky evinces in his defense against the plagiarism charge.

Malmuth believes that a significant number of visitors to the 2+2 forums who would have bought a 2+2 book decide not to because they can get all of the good, “quality information” on the site that they need. This view suggests that the form in which this information is presented is of no consequence -- that we don’t care whether it comes in a book written by a “noted poker authority” or via a post from some dude who goes by Butterfingers123. Just tell me what to do when my continuation bet on a raggedy flop gets check-raised by that LAG from UTG and I’m happy, right?

Wrong. While the centrality of print media in our culture has certainly been threatened in our electronic age, the formal differences between books and websites are so vast -- and significant -- one cannot reasonably argue that the 2+2 forums are going to “destroy book sales” for the company. Those of us who read books and want to read more books will continue to do so, no matter what “stickies” get created. And those of us who don’t read books still won’t read them, no matter what “stickies” get created.

Malmuth isn’t entirely indifferent to form, of course. After all, his primary worry here has to do with the formal characteristics of his website. He’d prefer the content of the site be presented in a less-organized, harder-to-navigate form, and is thus asking his moderators to help him achieve this goal by removing the helpful stickies. He seems thus to have some idea that form affects content -- that the content of his site (its usefulness, its value) will be affected by these changes to the site’s form.

But the attention to form here is utterly misplaced. If anything, the changes to the site’s form are intended to lessen the value of its content.

And to end on a less theoretical note, let’s think of the practical consequences of that change. If the site becomes less user-friendly, fewer will spend time on it. And thus fewer will become aware of the books. And fewer will buy them.

(EDIT [added 8/14/08, 5:30 p.m.]: It appears the message from Malmuth to the 2+2 mods was sent some time ago -- likely near the end of May, judging from the post count listed under Malmuth’s name in the message -- although it was not until earlier this week that it became known to anyone beyond the original recipients. Also, it looks as though after subsequent discussion the directive from Malmuth contained in the message was ultimately rescinded -- good news to those who appreciate the usefulness of the “stickies.” If you are curious, start here and read further to learn a bit more about the original message and its having been leaked this week.)