Lock Down

Among the weekend poker news was the report that Lock Poker, for a good while one of the more conspicuous “rogue” online poker sites continuing to serve U.S. players post-Black Friday, went offline sometime last Friday.

John Mehaffey first reported for U.S. Poker that the site had gone down on Saturday, although over the last few weeks it had become something of a ghost site with only a handful of players at a time. Others reported on the shutdown as well, which appears also to include that “SuperWins” site that popped up about a year ago as a surreptitious skin of Lock.

While there hasn’t been a lot of activity on Lock of late, the site has remained well within the poker community’s consciousness thanks to the site having become increasingly unreliable with processing withdrawals, then finally becoming altogether unresponsive to all withdrawal requests. Mehaffey notes how troubles withdrawing date back to late 2012, with the site not having processed any withdrawal requests at all since April 2014.

He lists “$10-$15 million” as an estimate of how much sits in Lock Poker accounts, although I’ve seen some guessing the total to be even higher. Or should I say nominally sits in those accounts, as the money surely is long gone, having been either spent or otherwise purloined by the site’s owners. (And some percentage of it probably never was anything more than “phantom” funds to start with, thinking of alleged payouts in freerolls, overlays being allegedly covered, and so on.)

Never has a site been more appropriately named, a fact I’ve already exploited more than once here in posts from 2013 punningly titled “Put Your Funds on Lock Poker (And Throw Away the Key)” and “Lock’s Stock in Peril.”

Those posts were written two years ago, and it’s amazing to think the site continued to function for so long afterwards with players continuing to deposit as the ability to withdrawal gradually diminished and then ceased altogether. There was a regulator for Lock -- Curaçao eGaming -- although they obviously weren’t acting legitimately in any way to ensure against the ongoing thievery. (In fact, Mehaffey notes the license with Curaçao is still valid.)

When I peeked over on Twitter earlier tonight it was interesting to see some back-and-forthing among some whom I follow regarding how much sympathy should be given to those losing money on Lock, with some taking the position players foolish enough to risk playing there -- especially after the troubles began in earnest -- got what they deserved.

Others are pointing out how some affiliates continued to advertise for Lock, with Card Player being the most conspicuous culprit after having continued to host banners and direct players to sign up and deposit up until May 2014. The assorted Lock Poker “pros” who continued to be associated with the site well after it became apparent to many it was not trustworthy are catching some heat again as well as they did before.

Some were surely encouraged to play on the site by Card Player and other affiliates, and perhaps by the pros, too, although their influence was likely less extensive. Anyhow, enough of the unwitting were hoodwinked to keep things going over there, even if only barely, up until Friday.

It’ll amount to a sad, belated postscript to all of the other scandals and disappointments that form the narrative of the fall of U.S. Online Poker 1.0. That story still continues with a few more lingering sites and Bovada (formerly Bodog) having gathered momentum of late as the currently most popular “rogue” site. According to PokerScout, Bovada (whose traffic has to be estimated) is now more popular than Full Tilt and PartyPoker, even, in terms of the number of active cash players.

With the story of U.S. Online Poker 2.0 starting so sluggishly and without much inspiration, the finish of the prequel continues to be more interesting, even if anticlimactic.

More on Tricky Dick

I was talking about Garry Wills’s excellent Nixon Agonistes last month, a book written and published during Nixon’s first term as president (i.e., prior to Watergate). The book is about a lot more than Nixon, actually, providing a comprehensive examination of American history and politics as well as other aspects of the culture. It’s a dense, scholarly book, and I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in the subject and/or era.

Have since picked up a few other Nixon-related titles, including a couple at a used bookstore this week. While I was there I saw taped to a bookcase that picture above featuring a creative use of a Nixon postage stamp (no shinola). Also have spent a few hours here and there listening to some of the Nixon tapes online and marveling at the wealth of other resources available regarding his presidency.

I’m not quite old enough to remember him as president, and so didn’t form any impressions of him until well after his fall. Such a complicated figure, endlessly fascinating yet almost never sympathetic (at least not to me).

In my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class we do discuss Nixon, primarily focusing on the much-repeated tale of his having been a successful poker player while serving in the Navy during World War II. James McManus frontloads his history of poker, Cowboys Full, with a catalogue of stories of U.S. presidents playing poker, and since we use McManus’s book as kind of a core text for the first part of the course, we focus a lot of energy early on thinking about some of those stories, a few of which come up again later on in the semester, too.

Earlier this week Bob Pajich pulled together a nice piece for Card Player in which he goes over the story of Nixon’s poker playing, titled “Men of Action -- Richard ‘The Big Bluffer’ Nixon.” Pajich draws on various sources including a 1983 interview in which Nixon addressed the idea that being a skillful poker player might be of special use to a president. Such is an argument advanced by McManus, too, at the start of Cowboys Full, and thus is one we consider as a class when we read and discuss that first chapter.

As Pajich points out, the place of poker in Nixon’s story is primarily confined to that early period prior to having begun his long, arduous ascent to the White House. It’s interesting, though, to overlay various poker-related strategies to his later political career, including the various ways he misplayed his “big stack” once he became president.

It was John Mitchell, Nixon’s first Attorney General who became part of the notorious Committee to Re-Elect the President (and who’d eventually serve prison time for his role in the Watergate cover-up), who characterized the many abuses of power during Nixon’s presidency as “the White House horrors.” And really, the more one reads and learns about all that was happening during that period, the more horrific it all seems. Talk about putting one’s “stamp” on the presidency (pun intended). It is amazing (and I guess, kind of heartening) to think how the U.S. government was able to survive a Nixon administration.

Like I say, though, the man himself is uncannily captivating. In his book, Wills characterizes Nixon as “the least ‘authentic’ man alive,” a “plastic man” who “does not exist outside his role, apart from politics.” “He lives in a cleared circle, an emotional DMZ, space razed and defoliated, so he cannot be ‘got to’ unexpectedly.” Referring to the ubiquitous Nixon masks that were already beginning to appear at the time of Nixon’s first inauguration (and would become especially popular during Watergate as a countercultural symbol), Wills describes the new president’s uneasy relationship with the youth of his day.

“At the 1969 inauguration,” Wills writes, “the streets were full of ashen Nixons. Kids in town to cause trouble wore crinkly white masks with that undeniable nose. But Nixon’s car sped past their jeering ranks, and, up on the reviewing stand, his face bunched in its instant toothed smile, so circumspect, so vulnerable.”

Then comes the devastating punchline: “He had this in common with the kids; he wears a Nixon mask.”

From the perspective of a poker player, being able to interact with others while existing within an “emotional DMZ” might seem favorable. Always being “circumspect” with regard to how others view you -- i.e., being cognizant of one’s own “image” and how others are responding to it -- is a much-needed ability at the tables, too. I’ve even heard poker players sometimes talk about playing as though they were wearing a “mask,” that is, kind of employing a bit of self-delusion as part of a strategy to prevent revealing too much to others.

But Nixon was “vulnerable,” too (surmises Wills), and while he may have consistently won in those stud games with fellow Naval officers -- and later on, as well, in the other “games” he played within the GOP establishment and the American voters -- there was a lot of uncertainty and self-doubt in his play, too, especially after he took office as president.

I was saying before how I might like to write some sort of short monograph about “Tricky Dick” that focused on his poker playing and perhaps tried to discuss some of these later episodes through the lens of poker. I may still do something along these lines, although now I’m thinking I’ll more likely try to create a kind of textbook for my class that looks at poker in American culture more broadly, perhaps with a Nixon chapter along the way. (Such a book would certainly attract a wider audience, I think.)

So I’ll add working that project to the growing list of goals for the new year. Sort of feeling like Nixon a little bit, who also tended to study and plan a lot before acting. Such was how he learned poker, working diligently away from the table to devise strategies he would then later employ. And as a politician, too, he studied and developed a complicated theory of leadership he then carried to his duties.

But there was a pretty severe disconnect between theory and practice in the latter case for Nixon, I think, wherein the application of his ideas failed. Hopefully I’ll avoid that misstep in the execution of my plans.

2013

There were a number of poker-related headlines late last week containing the above figure. Those headlines appeared over stories reporting on the swift, unceremonious end to the brief hope that an online poker bill would be attached to a $150 billion package covering the extension of the employee payroll tax cut, unemployment benefits, and Medicare-related items.

Initial reports surfaced about a week ago suggesting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was going to attach the online poker legislation to the bill. Then, just a couple of days later, Reid squashed such thoughts in a comment to a reporter saying there’d be no such attachment.

Word filtered around subsequently indicating that to attach the online poker legislation would threaten the bill (which Reid supported). Julio Rodriguez reported for Card Player that Reid’s “last ditch effort” to include the online poker legislation “fell short when it became apparent that it could put the entire legislation in jeopardy.” Perhaps it did, or perhaps it didn’t. Apparently Reid tried to attach other provisions to the bill, too, but those were all rejected by fellow legislators and not included either.

To finish the story, the bill was voted upon on Friday without any sort of ideas about regulating and licensing online poker in the U.S. attached, and just over two-thirds of the House voted in favor (across party lines). It also passed the Senate 60-36, where the Democrats were mostly for and Republicans against.

Thus came the headlines, most of which dovetailed upon Howard Stutz’ report for the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “Online Poker seen folding its hand until 2013.” In addition to reporting on the non-inclusion of online poker in the federal bill, Stutz also alludes to Nevada having passed its own legislation last year and state regulators having further finalized regulations to ready the state to offer its own online gaming licenses. Stutz says 13 companies have applied for licenses thus far.

The “2013” Stutz included in his headline and lead paragraph -- and subsequently repeated every else you read the story being summarized (because, after all, we’re in an extensive echo chamber here) -- represents a gaming analyst’s speculation that no federal online poker bill will be brought up again during this election year, although the truth is that possibility remains only slightly less likely at present than it had been before. (In other words, still about the same long shot.)

There are other bills to which online poker legislation could get attached, but in truth few really know if or when such might be attempted. And as was the case last week when this talk suddenly arose for a couple of days before just as suddenly dying down, I don’t think there will be a lot of lead time if something along these lines were to occur.

In other words, “2013” is really not much more than a number here to represent a vague, calculated guess, because there’s a little less “2012” today than there was last week, and “2014” seems too far off to focus upon as a legitimate target for predictions.

All of which is to say I’m convinced no one is really sure of much of anything of substance when it comes to predicting what is going to happen on a federal level with regard to online gambling. Not with any real certainty, anyway.

What is easier to predict is that absent any real knowledge or information, we’ll keep repeating these numbers to each other.