Please Be Patient

Just a couple of weeks left in 2011. Every other year I’ve kept this blog, this would be the time of year I’d be devoting at least part of my mental energy -- as well as a post or three -- to thoughts of how my online poker ledger was going to add up for the year.

Can’t really say that’s the case this time around.

Since the spring I’ve continued to play for small amounts with money won in freerolls on a couple of sites, but there hasn’t been any serious attention paid to sessions or results -- nor the occasional withdrawals -- that have punctuated previous years.

I suppose I could say -- without even looking up the figures -- that 2011 is going to result in a net positive year for me as far as playing online poker goes. I say that because I remember exactly what I was able to withdraw from PokerStars back in early May, and I know that amount was greater than what I still have sitting over in my Full Tilt Poker account. Or at least what the number is that represents what I should have there.

I wonder how other players will be calculating their FTP money here at year’s end?

The news this week has been that the site’s deal with Groupe Bernard Tapie has moved a step closer to completion, which those of us with money still stuck on Tilt all hope represents another step toward the eventual return of our funds.

According to Subject:Poker, Full Tilt Poker’s ownership voted and agreed to the further transfer of assets to the Tapie group. But several more steps have to be taken before the deal will be completed and the U.S. Department of Justice takes over the business of getting the $150 million or so back to the U.S. players. (The Tapie group will assume responsibility for everyone else.) For more on where things stand at present, see S:P.

Pretty clear that 2011 is going to end without anyone getting back into their Full Tilt Poker accounts. Think back to the afternoon of Friday, April 15. Could you have imagined?

It took me a long time, but I finally removed the FTP icon from my “dock” on my Mac laptop short while back. Every now and then I’d accidentally click the sucker, then watch it enthusiastically bounce back and forth while the program failed to load.

I’d stare at the familiar message that I was “just a few seconds away from playing the most exciting poker games anywhere online,” smirk a little at that added directive to “please be patient,” then cancel the operation.

I enjoyed Pauly’s recent post on Tao of Poker, “Zombie Poker Apocalypse,” in which he meditates on the current status of poker and poker-themed entertainment, specifically televised poker. The scene Pauly describes reminds me of that stupid, bouncing icon... there’s movement, but no life.

I realized yesterday that I’m on a streak of ending posts with “we’ll see”-type statements. Such is the general state of things at the moment, poker-wise, I suppose.

We’re in a holding pattern. Necessarily waiting. For our money. For our game.

Epic Returns

No, that title isn’t referring to my having realized any sort of massive ROI. Rather the latest Epic Poker League series is underway, about three months after the last one concluded.

This is the third tourney series so far of the EPL’s first season. A fourth will happen late Jan.-early Feb. of next year, followed directly by the Season One Championship in which the top 27 money winners in the four “regular season” Main Events will play in a $1 million two-day freeroll.

The third EPL Main Event (which kicked off yesterday) adopts an unusual format that recalls a couple of those “mix-max” or “split format” events from the most recent World Series of Poker Europe in Cannes, France.

If you recall, the €3,200 no-limit hold’em shootout Event No. 4 at the WSOPE (won by Tristan Wade) had players playing eight- to ten-handed on the first day, three-handed on the second, then ten-handed for the final table. Then Event No. 5, a €10,400 buy-in event won by Michael Mizrachi, had them play a mix of multi-table tournament poker and heads-up. For that one, Days 1 and 2 were played as an MTT, nine-handed the first day then six-handed the next. Then from Day 3 onward the remaining 16 players played a heads-up tourney, although they carried forward the chips they’d won from the first two days, making for uneven starting stacks for the remaining matches.

The new EPL event kind of resembles that latter WSOPE event in that it begins as an MTT then becomes a heads-up tourney at the very end. Days 1 through 4 are played as a multi-table tournament, eight-handed on the first day, then seven-handed on Day 2, then six-handed on Day 3 (or on Day 2 if they get to 36 players), then four-handed on Day 4 when they will play down to five players.

Those last five will return on Day 5 and play down to two, then those two will play best two-out-of-three heads-up, starting out the first two matches with whatever stacks they had when the third-place player was knocked out. If those two make it to a third match, they’ll reset the stacks to even for the decider. (Make sense?)

Exactly 100 players came out for this third EPL $20,000 buy-in Main Event, up from the 97 who played the second Main Event (an eight-handed MTT, won by Mike McDonald) though less than the 137 who played the first (a six-handed MTT, won by David “Chino” Rheem). Erik Seidel -- surprise, surprise -- was the overnight leader among the 61 who survived to today’s Day 2. (See updates here.)

Not sure what the format will be for the fourth EPL Main Event. It had been originally planned as a “mix max” event (and #3 as a heads-up only event), but I imagine that’s being changed. Probably will end up a straightforward MTT, if I had to guess. (EDIT [added 6:45 p.m.]: Sounds like the fourth one will be a regular nine-handed MTT, but with a shot clock! Thanks, Kevmath, for pointing me to the info.)

Neither am I sure how exactly to interpret the turnout for this week’s Main Event. Or even the relationship between turnouts and the overall health and future of the Epic Poker League. If there had been a huge drop off from the second event, that certainly would’ve been meaningful. But holding steady is a less obvious indicator of where things stand, I think.

The partnering of Epic with USA Today and Big Lead Sports announced a couple of weeks ago -- a move that seems part of that general effort by the EPL to try to move poker more into the mainstream -- is also suggestive of future machinations, though again it’s hard to say what exactly it all signifies.

Meanwhile, the finale of this third EPL Main Event will once again necessarily involve several of poker’s biggest names. Kind of expect it won’t be long before the EPL makes the move others have made to offer live streaming coverage of its final tables, although I don’t believe there is any plan for such this time around. Perhaps for the big freeroll in February?

I know I’d be curious to see that. As I am about where the EPL might be headed, generally speaking.

The Bravado of Bovada

This morning Bodog -- the site where even Americans can still play online poker for real money as well as bet on sports, horse racing, and play other casino games -- shifted its American customers over to a new site awkwardly called “Bovada.”

The new site appears to feature all of the same software and design as the Bodog site, with only the URL and name differing. According to the site’s welcome page, the new name was chosen deliberately to begin with the same letters as Bodog so as to help users “find us in your browser for the next few weeks.”

The site has an odd “.lv” extension (a Latvian domain), which it explains is meant to “remind our players of Las Vegas, the number one gambling destination in the U.S.” And, of course, the made-up word “Bovada” sounds a little like Nevada as well, thus perhaps furthering the association.

While the rest of the world continues to play and gamble on Bodog, then, we Americans are now being invited to visit Bovada, a kind of mythical destination where I suppose we are to believe U.S. laws cannot reach.

Way back when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 was first signed into law and the possible fate of U.S.-facing online poker sites was first being discussed, nearly everyone held up Bodog as the least likely to survive in the U.S. going forward. Remember? The fact that Bodog offered other gambling games, especially sports betting, alongside poker, caused most in the poker world to believe the site couldn’t possibly be long for the U.S. post-UIGEA.

Some of us also recall Calvin Ayre (who founded Bodog back in 2004) brazenly appearing on the cover of Forbes magazine and being featured in a story whose title -- “Catch Me If You Can” -- paraphrased the entrepreneur’s attitude toward the U.S. Department of Justice. That, too, made it look like Ayre was just asking for trouble, which in a few short months would potentially arrive in the form of the UIGEA.

Lots of talk at the time by poker people over whether or not our favorite game was in fact covered under the UIGEA’s original definition of a “bet or wager” as “the staking or risking by any person of something of value upon the outcome of a contest of others, a sporting event, or a game subject to chance.” However one came down on that one -- then or now -- all tended to agree that what Bodog was doing by offering sports betting along with other games pretty obviously subject to chance must make them a more obvious target.

But somehow they perservered. On Black Friday, when we first scanned the list of sites targeted -- PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and UltimateBet -- many were surprised Bodog had escaped being included in that list.

Sorta seems like ever since I first opened an account on Bodog way back in late 2006 they’ve been on the move.

It was right about the time I first started playing on Bodog that the site announced it was planning to scale back its advertising in the U.S. This was back during that brief period when 2006 WSOP Main Event champion Jamie Gold was representing Bodog, a relationship fated to last only a short time.

I wrote Bodog at the time asking about the decision regarding advertising and whether they like Party and others were about to leave hte U.S. They wrote back to confirm their plans while also underscoring their stance that the site was “completely legal” and a “legitimate business.”

Then a few months later, in a somewhat less legitimate-seeming turn, Bodog temporarily lost their domain. Remember in the summer of 2007 when they suddenly went offline for half a day when they lost the dot-com thanks to some legal legerdemain by an enterprising web designer who’d sued them for patent infringement? They were NewBodog.com for a short while after that, then BodogLife.com, then they finally got their dot-com back.

I know Bodog didn’t take bets from Canadians for a long time, then opened up in 2009 via bodog.ca site. Last May -- after Black Friday -- Bodog finally got rid of the dot-com site altogether, moving the operation entirely over to bodog.eu. (The Canadian site now redirects there, too, I believe.)

It wasn’t long after that (in July), that we heard about this move to eliminate the Bodog brand in the U.S. Sounded at first like Bodog was pulling out of America altogether, but we soon came to understand that wasn’t the case.

Then in September the site removed full tables from their lobby to try to thwart PokerScout and anyone else tracking what was happening on the site. Didn’t exactly work as planned, but the change did make it less simple for most of us to know what exactly was happening on the site.

And, of course, a couple of weeks ago came the move to wholly anonymous play at the poker tables, a move accompanied by a variety of stated motives but which also obviously makes it more difficult for observers to observe.

Yes, Bodog -- or Bovada -- is still here.

I’ve long stopped playing on the site. And with anonymous tables, I can’t say I’m at all enthused about ever hopping back on there again. Can’t help but continue to be intrigued by the site having endured in the U.S. to this point, though. And even if I’m not a participating citizen of Bovada, I expect I’ll still be monitoring its diplomatically difficult co-existence within American borders.

Online Poker’s Hot Stove League

“When might Americans, who invented the freakin’ game in the first place, be able to play it again on the Internet?”

So writes James McManus at the conclusion of his new piece over on Grantland, “Full Tilt Boogie: The UIGEA and You.” In his lengthy feature McManus recounts the last eight months or so of online poker in the United States -- including the whole Full Tilt fiasco -- a prelude, it appears, to a series of articles he’ll be writing for the site.

Some of us Yanks are still playing online poker, actually. Sort of.

I’ve mentioned here how I’ve won some freerolls on Hero Poker and Carbon Poker, thereby earning myself some modest real money rolls on both sites. Had sort of an interesting series of exchanges with support over at Hero Poker over the last week or so which I thought I’d share, if only to pass along an actual anecdote related to playing online poker. (Remember when we used to share those all the time?)

One aspect of Hero I have liked is the fairly frequent awarding of tickets for sit-n-gos and tourneys (all micro stuff) as well as the occasional bonus. The more you play, the higher you rise through the various levels they have on the site (Farmer, Recruit, Barbarian, etc.), and I believe you earn some sort of small something each step of the way. (Here’s a page describing it all, if you’re curious.)

In late November I tripped over one of the levels and was given both a play-through bonus worth $15 (i.e., I had to play a certain amount to earn it) and an instant bonus of $10. As is my custom, I recorded the instant bonus in my daily ledger along with other info about my play for that day, and pretty much forgot about it.

About two weeks later I played a short session and won a few bucks, then when I went to record my balance noticed I was down a little from when I started. The discrepancy was exactly $10. Not much, although unfortunately ten bucks represents a decent percentage of my roll at the site.

So I sent an email to support. Hero is a small site, but they do quite well getting back to you quickly whenever anything arises. Sometimes, though, the promptness of the replies aren’t exactly matched by clarity. I got a quick response which said the money was deducted “because on November 23rd you were credited with an instant cash bonus twice... by mistake.”

Fine, I thought. Kind of uncool just to take money out of my account without any sort of heads-up, but at least I understood why. But when I looked back at my records -- as well as the “Player Admin” they have for you there at Hero (a fairly handy feature) -- I could see on 11/23 that I’d only gotten the bonus once.

To make a long story short, we ended up exchanging several more emails before someone was finally able to explain that I’d gotten an instant bonus for $10 way back in early September and the latter one on 11/23 was awarded erroneously. Also, there apparently had been a bulk email sent out regarding the error and correction, but I had never received it.

Along the way one of the emails had instructed me both to “disregard the email” I had just been sent as well as to “please just use the very last email.” In the same sentence. Like I say, the responses come in a timely fashion, though they aren’t always as lucid as one would like.

All of it reminded me of PokerStars and how they, too, always rapidly responded to any support requests. And clearly, too. I also thought about how they’d handle a situation such as this one -- how Stars would likely allow me to keep an erroneously awarded bonus. But Hero is a small outfit and if they did issue even small bonuses to all of their players by mistake, I can see how they wouldn’t be able to handle the loss as easily as Stars might.

The future of these relatively small U.S.-facing sites has to be tenuous, I’d think, at least as far as their continuing to serve Americans goes. That said, I assume a number of these sites (Hero included) probably couldn’t really continue without the continuing to serve the U.S. -- the only part of the world where they currently can compete and Stars cannot.

We’re definitely the minor leagues here in the U.S. right now as far as online poker is concerned... not even Single-A ball, but Rookie league. Worldwide, PokerStars is the only big league left. In fact, “big” isn’t a big enough word for them, given their overwhelming dominance of the market at the moment. Party, iPoker, Ongame, and 888 we might call Double-A, but then so are Stars’ own French- and Italian-only sites. Then come the Merge guys, Bodog, Cake, and the rest.

I suppose the baseball analogy sprang to mind here because like poker, baseball is an American game. McManus’s piece and particularly his anti-UIGEA arguments are further tempting me to refer to our online poker game as currently mired in the “Bush leagues” and pun on the name of the person who signed the UIGEA into law.

But while that action was certainly central to the story of online poker’s fall in the U.S., it was hardly the only contributor. Really, the better baseball metaphor for online poker would be to say we’re amid a kind of “hot stove league” -- i.e., an off-season during which we are having to be patient while awaiting the return of our favorite game.

Will be interested to see where McManus goes with his Grantland articles. And, of course, what will happen with online poker in the U.S., too.

On Second Thoughts

Was a fun day of football yesterday. Did well on picks, including benefiting from all three of those miracudiculous finishes that saw the Houston Texans, Denver Broncos, and New York Giants each pull out victories when defeat seemed all but certain.

I’ve mentioned before how the pool I’m in is a simple pick’em pool -- i.e., we pick winners only, not fretting about the spread. Which means that every week everybody’s picking mighty Green Bay to win and poor Indy to lose. But there are usually a handful of games in which our little group of pigskin prophets part from one another.

With the Dallas-New York game, I’d gone back and forth a few times on Sunday morning before finally selecting the Giants. I figured even though they’d lost four straight, three of those games were against top tier teams (49ers, Packers, Saints). Was also counting on NYG being in do-or-die mode as a loss would pretty much dash their playoff hopes for good.

So I submitted the pick before lunch, and mentioned to Vera Valmore something about being less than confident about it.

“You can always change it,” she said with a grin, knowing that I have a strict policy against such second guessing. I laughed in acknowledgement of her jokey challenge to my resolve.

Funny thing, though... just minutes before the game began last night, I was possessed with an urge to switch the pick. Which, as Vera had indicated, is possible right up until the opening kickoff.

But I resisted. And when the Giants were down 12 with five minutes to go, I again mostly resisted second guessing my policy regarding second guessing, having resigned myself to missing the pick. Then came one touchdown. And another. And a two-point conversion and a blocked field goal.

And then I felt like a genius. You know, in the got-all-my-chips-in-as-a-huge-dog-and-hit-like-a-luckbox sort of way.

I think that for most of us second guessing oneself is almost unavoidable. And if we engage in pursuits like poker or trying to pick winners of football games, we necessarily give ourselves repeated tests of self-confidence to go along with the analytical challenges already present in these tasks.

People who second guess themselves a lot often also worry about not having control over their own lives. Meanwhile, participating in any gambling game like poker or sports betting also necessarily invites a kind of chance element into one’s life that requires us to recognize and accept that there are events that will affect us that we simply cannot do anything about.

All of which is to say that these gambling games perhaps answer some sort of need a lot of us have to test ourselves -- to see how well we can withstand the inevitable second guessing which the games invite upon us.

Then again, maybe they don’t.

In Which I Nearly Get Run Over on Memory Lane

In his weekly updates regarding our football pool, our friend Dr. Pauly has started referring to me as “the absent-minded professor.” He doesn’t know it, but by alluding to the 1961 Disney film in which Double Indemnity star Fred MacMurray took a turn as the flubber-inventing title character, Pauly is in fact highlighting what is essentially my biggest fear in the pool -- to forget to submit my picks.

I’m actually quite organized, hardly the absent-minded type, although this week hasn’t been the greatest for me. I could blame it on the end of the semester -- always a very distracting time for teachers -- but now that I’m teaching just a single class that really isn’t much of an excuse.

There have been a couple of uncharacteristic slip-ups this week, I’m sorry to report. Small memory lapses serving to remind that perfection eludes us all. The most comical of these by far happened last night. Indeed, it was almost as slapsticky as some of the scenes in The Absent-Minded Professor.

Vera Valmore and I own a big Ford diesel truck which she sometimes uses to pull horse trailers. Not long ago I we were shuttling vehicles back and forth from the barn to our house and the truck wound up at home rather than the barn where it normally sits parked. So last night while Vera was at the barn riding I drove the truck out with the plan to leave it there, and she would drive us both back.

I had to transfer some stuff from another car to the truck while also remembering to take Vera her extra truck key and a few other items from the house. To summarize, there were a handful of things I needed to keep in mind in preparing for the trip, and somehow I managed to remember them all.

Except one, that is.

In transferring items to and from vehicles I occasionally set a few on the hood of the truck rather than on the seat. In retrospect, that was not a recommended choice.

I initially drove out, got halfway down the road heading toward the interstate, then realized I’d left the key for Vera on the counter. Drove back, secured the key, then left again, traveling about a mile or so to the interstate.

I had just gotten onto the ramp downward to the highway when I noticed an item flying off the hood of the truck. My wallet! Don’t ask me why I had thought it needful to set my wallet there during all of my fiddling, because I have no idea myself. Incredibly it had remained put during that initial extra trip around the block as well as the mile that led up to my picking up speed to merge onto the interstate.

Luckily there was some shoulder available on the side of the ramp, and I pulled over quickly and got out. It was just about dusk, but there was still enough light for me to see my wallet sitting in the middle of the road a few dozen yards back. Cars were driving over it, and I had to wait for them to pass before dashing out into the road to retrieve the sucker.

I picked it up to see all of the cards had fallen out -- credit and debit cards, library cards, my health insurance card, my voting registration card, all of it. Even my Total Rewards card, haha. I looked around to see a few scattered on the pavement, and a few more among the fallen leaves that lined each side of the road.

The next ten minutes were spent dashing up and down and back and forth, grabbing cards and dodging cars, trying desperately to keep my head clear and not succumb entirely to the absurdity of the situation. It was getting darker, and fast. I had recovered what seemed like all of my cards except one. Unfortunately it was a debit card, one of the few among the bunch I really didn’t want to leave lying somewhere on the road.

Finally I saw what looked like my debit card sitting among some leaves. But it was only an empty cigarette pack. Then I thought I saw it back in the road, but that was just my similarly-colored savings card from the grocery store.

At last I spotted the debit card back up the road where the wallet had first taken flight. I waited for a couple more cars to pass, ran out and grabbed it, jogged back down to the truck, and hopped back into the driver’s seat.

As I drove I thought briefly of that “data leak” of information regarding UltimateBet customers from last week (discussed here). If I hadn’t managed to recover all of my cards, I could’ve replaced them, sure. But I’d have still worried vaguely about some of my personal information getting literally spilled about.

Anyhow, everything seems to be back where it belongs today. As far as I can remember, anyway.

Meanwhile, I think I might just go ahead and make my Sunday NFL picks right now.

Five-Suited Poker

The history of playing cards dates way, way back, well before anything resembling poker.

Most historians point to east Asia to the Korean peninsula and China for early references to cards, going all of the way back to the seventh and eighth centuries to find cards made from strips of silk. By the year 1000 and after come more frequent references to cards and card games, particularly in China (where paper was invented). It would take another few hundred years -- until the late 14th century or so -- before cards began turning up in Europe.

By the time cards came to Europe there were already examples of 52-card decks, although there were also some decks of 36 cards, 40 cards, and other amounts. One 52-card deck that turned up in Italy by way of Persia featured four suits -- coins, cups, scimitars, and polo sticks. As cards spread across Europe came the introduction of court figures (kings, queens, knaves) as well as the four suits (spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs) printed in red and black.

All of that happened by the late 15th century or so, meaning when it comes to playing cards, games with 52 cards and the four suits with which we are familiar has pretty much been the norm for the entire modern era.

Thus a lot of precursors to poker like mus (Spain), poch (Germany), primiera (Italy), brag (England), and poque (France) were usually played with similar decks, as was poker when it first came about in the early 19th century. Some of those games featured smaller decks (several with just 40 cards), but all were played with four suits. (One other game considered an ancestor of poker, the Persian game As nas, was actually played with a 25-card deck with five suits.)

Subsequently, just about all variants of poker have been played with four suits during the two centuries the game has been around, but attempts have been made now and then to introduce a fifth suit. Probably the most notable of these attempts occurred in the late 1930s when a five-suited, 65-card deck was briefly introduced.

In the United States, the fifth suit -- “eagles” -- was printed in green. Around the same time in England there were five-suited decks produced with the fifth suit printed in blue and called “royals.”

In truth, the five-suited decks were not really made for poker but rather for bridge, which by the late 1930s was enjoying a major boom in popularity in the U.S. According to “As They Saw It” (a neat website that compiles information from news articles about various 20th-century topics), there were something between 12 and 15 million bridge players in America at this time. Worldwide the game had taken off in a big way, too, with the World Bridge Olympic in 1938 attracting nearly 200,000 players from 57 different countries.

Much as we’ve seen happen in poker over the last decade with the introduction of new games coming in the wake of the explosion in popularity that has occurred, the bridge boom also inspired some attempts at innovation, including the idea of five-suited bridge. Apparently the idea originated in Austria, moved over to England, then made it to the U.S.

It sounds like the introduction of five-suited bridge got a lot of publicity in the U.S. with many wanting to get the new decks and give it a shot. The game only remained in the spotlight for a short while, however, as the five-suited game proved too cumbersome. The contract bridge master Ely Culbertson pronounced at the time that “the average player has not yet thoroughly learned how to play with four suits, let alone five,” correctly signaling that five-suited bridge would likely be just a fad.

Card manufacturers quickly stopped producing the five-suited decks, but a few found their way into poker games here and there, which I imagine led to some interesting variations. Indeed, you can see in this picture there was included in the five-suited decks a card indicating hand rankings for “five suit poker,” with a five-of-a-kind beating a straight flush.

Today there is a company called Stardeck that continues to produce five-suited decks (their fifth suit is “stars”). Their website has some interesting discussion of how the fifth suit comes into play in traditional poker games as well as some other historical anecdotes about five-suited card games, if you are curious to read more.

In his 1945 Pocketbook of Games, Albert Morehead made mention of the already scarce five-suited decks, noting how “a five-suit bridge game was widely played for some months, but was soon forgotten.” Morehead also opines that “five-suit poker made a better game, but can seldom be played today because the cards are no longer generally on sale.”

Morehead doesn’t back up that claim with any evidence to support why five-suited poker was better, although if you hunt around the Stardeck site you’ll see “testimonials” regarding five-suited card games, one of which mentions how the larger deck makes it possible to accommodate more players.

Fun to think about the existence of a fifth suit, even in theory. In fact it’s probably more fun in theory than in practice, although never having played with such a deck I can’t say for certain what it feels like to draw an eagle flush.

Poker’s Not-So-Square Deal

President Barack Obama yesterday delivered an address on the economy in Osawatomie, Kansas. Or campaign speech, if you like. We are, after all, already amid another presidential campaign, even if the election is nearly a year away.

This isn’t a political blog and so I’m not alluding to Obama’s speech for any reason other than to evoke an idea about poker -- specifically about the “skill-vs.-luck” argument that often comes up in discussions about legislating the game.

Much of the reporting on the speech today is pointing to parallels between a few of Obama’s talking points and ideas advanced by Theodore Roosevelt in a famous speech also delivered in Osawatomie in 1910.

Roosevelt became president when William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, just a few months into McKinley’s second term. TR was reelected in 1904, then chose not to run again in 1908. However, TR came back to compete for the 1912 election, and the Osawatomie speech was part of that effort. (TR would not be elected again, as Woodrow Wilson became the nation’s 28th president.)

This was the speech in which TR argued that government needed first and foremost to protect American workers’ ability to earn a living and make their own way without being exploited by corrupt business practices. The speech is known especially for introducing TR’s “New Nationalism” idea which dovetailed with the “Square Deal” agenda he had pursued when president.

It was that assurance of a “Square Deal” -- a term borrowed from poker -- that most commenting on Obama’s speech are highlighting today. One sound bite from Obama’s speech getting a lot of play goes as follows:

“I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them.”

There are a lot of ways we could talk about this idea of everyone getting “a fair shot” and “play[ing] by the same rules” in the context of poker. But I have just one thought in mind I wanted to throw out that kind of connects with this “square deal” talk.

Many of those who defend poker do so by highlighting its skill component, something that is said to distinguish the game in a meaningful way from other purely chance-based gambles like the lottery or roulette or what have you. For some, this makes poker worthy of being legalized as a game not unlike sports or other competitions in which players test their skills against one another.

A few who make this argument get carried away and try to minimize or ignore entirely the fact that chance does play a role in poker. Poker is certainly a form of gambling, but one in which various skills can be employed which often help one overcome the game’s chance element and promote the more-skilled players ahead of those with less ability.

It occurred to me recently how the very fact that poker does reward the skillful -- that it isn’t like just picking a number and hoping it hits -- might make some people less comfortable with it than they are with pure chance games like the lottery.

With the lottery, there’s no disputing that everyone has a “fair shot” (relative to one another, anyway). And unless the operation of the lottery is crooked, everyone “plays by the same rules,” too. But in poker, some really are better equipped than others to succeed. It’s a game that divides us, that highlights our differences. The fact is, whenever we sit down at a table it is very likely some are going to have an advantage over others.

Those of us who play poker understand how players come to gain that advantage -- i.e., by study, by experience, by work. Sure, you could say we all had a “fair shot” at some previous point, but once we’ve taken a seat it soon becomes clear that some have an edge over others.

That’s never the case with the lottery. We’re all equally equipped there.

I wonder if perhaps some percentage of non-players who are made uncomfortable by poker dislike it even more because it requires skill -- that it isn’t a game in which anyone can play and have a “fair shot.” And since it involves money and players betting on themselves and against others -- and, well, that chance element in there complicating things, too -- poker thus becomes all the more difficult for some to tolerate.

I’ve probably unnecessarily complicated my point with the Obama/Roosevelt references, but I hope the idea is coming through. Obviously some oppose poker because they view it as gambling -- they object to poker just as they object to roulette or slots or other gambling games (on moral grounds, or for other reasons).

But could it be there are others who object to poker because it isn’t enough like those other games? People to whom talk of poker’s skill component in fact makes them less comfortable with the idea of legally allowing the game? People who fear poker because, well, they realize it isn’t necessarily a “square deal” in the way the lottery is (even if the “deal” the lottery offers is equally bad to all)?

Seems like this could be an issue -- not the biggest one, but an issue -- with which proponents of poker might have to... erm... deal.

Bodogoholics Anonymous

“If you paid me to sit for a year and think only of ways to make online poker less good, I doubt I could improve upon ‘anonymous tables.’”

So tweeted @JuliusGoat yesterday, responding to Bodog’s sudden move to “anonymous tables” last week and the subsequent brouhaha. As the respected author of the award-avoiding Stupid/System, I trust Mr. Goat’s judgment here.

Because the man definitely knows stupid.

I’ve seen a number of comments over the last few days regarding the switch. The forum posters seem to hate-hate-HATE it. And if what they are saying is to be believed, many who played on the site are talking about withdrawing their funds and never going back. You know, like dedicated drinkers suddenly swearing off the stuff for good.

I also saw that the revelation yesterday over on the HH Smithy blog that the new Bodog tables aren’t in fact as anonymous as they seem. A site that sells hand histories, the hackersmiths over at HH Smithy have managed to show how it is still possible to identify individual players and in fact find out their Bodog account numbers, too.

Here’s the video, if you haven’t seen it:



Thus while Bodog advertises their new tables as completely anonymous, that’s apparently not exactly the case. Of course, even if they were anonymous, fears about cheating and especially collusion should remain high for anyone playing on the site.

Not only are there no usernames or avatars with which to identify opponents, player notes have been disabled, too. There is no way to see mucked cards anymore. And hand histories -- never simple to deal with on the site -- cannot be easily saved, either, which to me would be the biggest reason to steer clear.

When playing online poker -- or making any sort of real money transaction online -- one simply has to be able to have some sort of record of the transaction. There are many reasons why this is so, including being able to consult such records should any dispute arise. For example here, should one have suspicions of collusion, it would be difficult if not impossible to build a case without any concrete evidence from hands played.

In its press release last week announcing the move to “anonymous tables,” Bodog described the change as part of the effort to implement a “Recreational Poker Model” on Bodog -- i.e., a place to play poker for fun where one needn’t worry about opponents gathering data on your play, incorporating that data in Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker, and using HUDs against you.

As the press release says, the new model “offers all players of all abilities the fairest place to play.”

(Remember when Bodog used to be the site where players were invited to “play hard” -- that hypermasculine ad campaign that made playing poker on the site sound just a wee bit like dropping Viagra? What is the slogan now -- “play nice”?)

Obviously if some have the ability to identify players (as the HH Smithy guys can), the whole idea of leveling the playing field this way is no longer valid. But even if this weren’t the case, it seems like making the games anonymous would tend to diminish the skill element even further, making the games more like the “in-Client Blackjack” the site is also proud to list among the innovations introduced into the newly-refurbished tables.

Such is the position of Kid Dynamite who in a blog post recently argued why he believes anonymous poker is in fact a “skill mitigator.”

As KD points out, not allowing players to keep track of opponents’ play means the information one gathers from playing against an opponent in one session is no longer of use the next time you sit down with that player. Responding to the suggestion that Bodog is the “fairest” site on which to play, Kid Dynamite says “‘Fair’ is one way to put it. ‘Taking the skill out of the game’ is another.”

There’s also, of course, the utter erasure of whatever social element existed for online poker that occurs when usernames, avatars, and the ability to search for certain players are removed. This sort of thing is important to many, in particular the “recreational player” who isn’t necessarily playing the game primarily to grind out a profit.

Thinking back to Mr. Goat’s suggestion that if given a year he couldn’t come up with a worse idea for online poker, I can’t help but think he’s being damned provoking. Truth be told, I’m finding myself responding to that pronouncement in much the same way the HH Smithy guys did when Bodog claimed in their press release that “Anonymous tables make... player data impossible to collect.”

I mean, there has to be a worse idea for online poker out there, yes? Put on your thinking caps, people, and let me hear your ideas. We can’t sit back and let a goat get our... you know, get us upset and all.

All comments welcome. Even anonymous ones.

UB Data Leak

At some point within the last couple of weeks, a large amount of information concerning player accounts on UltimateBet was made available on the web. The information was contained in a number of Excel and text files -- like 150 or so -- and could be downloaded by anyone in possession of the URL.

The files are all dated around the middle of last month. Late last week someone posted a link to the page on the Two Plus Two forums, then deleted the post just a few minutes later. However, a small number of people -- including the moderators at 2+2 -- were able to obtain the URL and get a look at what the files contain.

One of those mods, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz, reported the leak on Subject:Poker early Friday evening. Haley Hintze got a look at the files and posted about them on her blog on Saturday afternoon. And Todd “Dandruff” Witteles (formerly of NeverWinPoker / DonkDown) also saw the files and shared an analysis on his new site.

The page linking to the files was taken down late Saturday, was back up again briefly early this morning, and is now down again. If you’re curious about what information is contained in the files, take a look at those three linked-to articles mentioned above. While there is certainly information most of us wouldn’t want spread around too liberally -- e.g., date of birth, mailing address, email address, phone number -- there doesn’t appear to be any specifics such as bank info, social security numbers, or the like contained in the files.

There’s some mystery about who is responsible for the leak (a rogue customer service employee?) as well as the possible reasons for the data having been sorted and assembled in this way (to sell to spammers?).

As Haley points out in her post, while some alarm is being expressed about this leak (e.g., in a new Two Plus Two thread started in response to the S:P article), it is not as though information provided to online poker sites hasn’t already been shared or sold or otherwise “leaked” around many times over. As Haley explains, “Most players are just commodities to the online sites. That’s the real why and how of it. Your data is secure as long as the site rakes in money, but once the squeeze comes, all bets are off, and anything that can be grabbed and sold is usually fair game.”

As I’ve written about here before, I had accounts on both Absolute Poker and UltimateBet.

I opened my AP account in October 2006, just a few days after the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was signed into law. It was right about that time that the company that owned AP bought out the company that owned UB. Talk then suggested the player bases would be consolidated, but instead AP and UB continued to operate independently. (It was not until July 2008 that the two sites would start touting themselves as the “Cereus network.”)

Then in August 2007, AP and UB offered to allow players to move funds back and forth between accounts on both sites. In early September 2007, I decided to do just that and moved some money from my AP account over into a new one on UB.

Within weeks the insider cheating scandal at Absolute Poker became public, and I immediately decided to withdraw all of my funds from both AP and UB. Getting my money out of AP was simple enough, but I had a hell of a time getting my measly roll off of UB. I finally did get my funds, but not after enduring a lot of frustration and absurdity first, details of which I shared in a post titled “UB Kidding Me.”

Shortly thereafter I began posting fairly frequently about the Absolute Poker scandal while also suggesting neither AP nor UB were sites to be trusted. Then in early March 2008 the UltimateBet scandal first hit the fan in a big way.

Thus I had an active AP account for a little over a year, and one on UB for just a couple of months. Just as with other online poker sites, I never gave either AP or UB any information I wasn’t comfortable sharing (e.g., I never gave credit card numbers, bank account numbers, my SSN, etc.).

Since Black Friday, the Full Tilt Poker fiasco has mostly eclipsed the equally-bad-for-poker mess that was/is AP/UB. Whereas the two Cereus networks had previously been the standard for dishonesty and fraud in online poker, FTP has swiftly evolved into the industry’s current benchmark for the-worst-it-can-get.

Thus while a few are anxious about it, the general outcry at the UB customer info leak has seemed mostly muted. I agree that it isn’t as though we should be all that surprised at the news that online poker sites have sold our information if there were a buck to made from it. But I do think this latest development should be remembered and included in the long list of ways UB managed to screw over its players. And the game.

Does kind of recall late 2007-early 2008 writing about this, though. Back when cheating and scandal in online poker was still relatively new. And for many, still something that seemed like it could be dismissed.