Let’s Hear It for the Noise

Sometime last summer, an enterprising person somewhere began placing a single comment -- in Chinese -- on one of my old posts every night at a certain time. Took me a couple or three times to notice the pattern, at which point I was curious enough to fuss with an online translation site for a minute or two to learn more. Couldn’t quite make out the entire meaning, but was able to figure out the comment had something to do with one of those many, heavily-advertised products designed to help treat erectile dysfunction.

It was anticlimactic, you might say.

Since my post was not, in fact, about erectile dysfunction, I thought it reasonable to delete the comment. I didn’t have comment moderation turned on at the time, so it would appear briefly on the site until I checked my email, got the notice of the comment, and deleted it. A minor annoyance, and eventually the comments stopped appearing.

Shortly after, I began to see a couple more of these non sequiturs regularly appearing as comments on other posts, and so finally decided it was time to turn the comment moderation on for good. As anyone who has commented on the blog over the last four or five months knows, you now have to wait for me to publish the comment for it to appear. I hope this extra step doesn’t prevent anyone from giving their feedback. I check my email frequently, so usually there isn’t much of a wait for comments to appear. And generally I publish ’em all (although I won’t always if they contain a superfluous link out).

Meanwhile, the spammy comments continue to arrive. I’m now rejecting these at a rate of about ten per day. They cover a wide range of non-pokery topics, are written in numerous languages (real and invented), and are primarily authored by our good friend “Anonymous” (natch). Mostly futile, these attempts. And still not much of a bother, really, as it is easy to reject several comments at once with just a few clicks.

As I mentioned, I get an email notification every time a comment is made, and so one kind of sour effect of all the spammy comments is the fact that my email box is now routinely filled with these non-messages. A minor bummer, actually, to check in and see new items waiting, but instead of finding real messages discover this applesauce instead.

Such has been the case pretty much ever since we all got our first email accounts back in the mid-90s, I suppose, with “junk e-mail” almost always coming at a higher clip than actual communications. We set up filters and try to manage the situation, thereby finding ways to endure all of the static. Such is our world, I guess, full of “noise” that we mostly accept as necessary accompaniment to the elusive “signals” we seek and deliver.

I’ve yet to have the chance to check out this new “Rush Poker” over at Full Tilt Poker, but from the summaries I’ve been reading it sounds like part of its appeal might be to filter out some of the “noise” one occasionally encounters at the online tables. Sounds like a truly novel concept, actually. If I understand it correctly, players join not a single table, but a “pool” of players that get distributed and redistributed constantly in order to keep all in action at all times. The moment a player folds, he or she is whisked to another table and dealt a new hand (against new opponents), so no down time. Wild.

For more on the Rush Poker concept, including some evaluation and discussion of consequences, you can check out the summaries/responses by F-Train, TripJax, and AlCantHang. Folks are buzzing about Rush Poker a lot on the forums, too, but I prefer reading blog posts about it. (You know, less noise.)

You can also head over to the Full Tilt website for a full explanation of how the game works, a list of Frequently Asked Questions, or a quick video tutorial with Phil Gordon.

Of course, as I assume some who’ve tried Rush Poker may already be ready to argue, a lot of the “noise” that is being filtered out is in fact what makes poker most fun and challenging -- e.g., the ability to learn opponents’ tendencies, to pick up patterns, to communicate. That is to say, not “noise” at all, but the game’s many “signals” that seem as though they’ve been mostly muted in this variation.

Am still curious to check it out, though. And to hear others’ feedback regarding Rush Poker. Just don’t link out to a Viagra retailer when leaving your comment.