White Belt Poker

I received an email from Virgin Poker late last night telling me all about how they’re relaunching their site and their software on Wednesday 23rd November. It’s a little-known site; in fact I only heard about it because the Virgin group of companies like to cross-sell as much as possible and Virgin.net are my ISP, so I registered a few months ago but just played a few cheap multi-table tourneys for practice purposes. There were far too few players at the site to make it worth visiting regularly though, so I hadn’t been there for a while. The one unusual feature is that the games are all played in UK Pounds rather than US Dollars because WagerWorks (the gaming software company behind them) have been granted gambling licenses by the Alderney Gambling Control Commission in the Channel Islands.

As I say, Virgin Poker have been using software created by WagerWorks (also used by WPTonline.com, Paddy Power, Hard Rock Casino and others), but this email mentioned that you would need to register a new account, which makes me wonder whether they are going with an updated version of the WagerWorks software or whether they are switching to Prima or Crypto or someone else. Frankly , I hope they are moving. I’ve had real problems with the software crashing. I’d assumed that the client software was written in Java, but a bit of research tells me that in fact, it’s written in Flash!

The good news is that to make up for the need to register again, they are holding five $1000 freerolls this week, starting on Thursday. And there’s another clue that they are switching to a different software supplier – the prizes are suddenly being listed in US Dollars rather then UK Pounds.

The bad news for anyone outside Europe is that each freeroll tournament starts at 8pm (presumably GMT, which is 3pm ET). In the absence of any information about the format, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and assume we’ll be playing no-limit hold’em. That’ll be a few late nights of tournament poker for me this weekend then (and just when I was working on my limit game too), so it’s just as well that I’d already taken Friday off work. I should be able to play in the first three at least; assuming I still have the will to live after the first one of course.

Update: The Virgin Poker launch has gone ahead and they’ve moved from using Wagerworks to Boss Media. There’s a press release from the company here triumphantly announcing the switch.

I’m not familiar with the software, but it’s the same as The London Poker Club use (apparently). Looks quite appealing anyway.

Empire Online have announced this morning that they’ve broken off takeover negotiations with Party Gaming.

In a pretty scathing statement, the Empire directors say that they “intend to institute and vigorously pursue legal proceedings as soon as possible”.

I can understand the Empire directors being upset if Party are offering a lower price now that the Empire shares have dropped in value; especially when the shares dropped as a direct result of Party seeking to end the ’skin’ deal the two companies had. Surely the Empire directors must have had a contingency plan if that happened though? They must have looked at the possibilty of moving onto the Prima or Cryptologic networks instead, if Party one day decided to pull the rug out.

So can we look forward to competitive sign-up and reload bonuses from Empire in the near future in order to build up their customer base? Fortunately for me, it’s one place I’ve never got around to playing at for some reason. Damn them! Am I doomed to a life of bonus whoring for the rest of my days?

Victoria Coren wrote an interesting article for yesterday’s Observer magazine about how players who’ve been around the game for a decade or more view the recent explosion in poker’s popularity:

The Real Deal – Victoria Coren (from The Observer, 13th November 2005)

In amongst the inevitable exposition for non-players, Coren admits to nagging doubts about the changes that are taking place:

We, the shabby long-time players, wanted people to understand the thrill and beauty of poker; this mesmerising knot of a game which I have spent nearly 15 years trying to unpick. We wanted it to be on television. We wanted sponsorship. We wanted security for poker’s future.

And now we feel … It is as though your favourite band has landed a huge recording contract, allowing them to make albums of the best quality with the best resources for many years to come. As a fan you are excited and optimistic, proud to share their music and relieved at their security. But you are not entirely certain, all the time, that you didn’t secretly love them a little more on those crackly old recordings knocked up years ago in the lead singer’s garage.

Coren also mentions that Anthony Holden was at the WSOP this year after being persuaded to write a follow up to his book “Big Deal” by his publishers. It should be titled “Bigger Deal”. She quotes Holden thus:

‘I realise with a sinking heart,’ says Holden, ‘that the game I have loved for nearly 40 years as a romantic, seedy, maverick outpost of la vie boheme has now become just another branch of corporate-logo American capitalism.’

Here’s an indication that the British government aren’t really aware of how online casinos work:

Online casinos face ad crackdown – silicon.com

A spokesman for the minister told silicon.com: “People have been breaking the law and it’s our job to uphold the law. Some ads offer free entry to poker competitions which is against the rules. This is about the content and what you are and are not allowed to publish.”

Could this lead to a new crackdown on freerolls? A chilling thought.

I mean, who cares about anti-terror legislation, ID cards, a national curriculum for babies, or schools being handed over to religious groups and evangelical used car salesmen? This is important!! Personally, I’ll be fighting for my right to be able to battle through 9999 other freeloaders for ten hours in the hope of winning $4.68 for reaching the final table.

My (hopefully) brief return to bonus-whoring went reasonably well last weekend at Bet 365. I easily played over a hundred raked hands in less than two hours (despite playing only one table while I got familiar with their software) to earn the first $20 of my $50 new player bonus. I ended up comfortably in the black even without taking the bonuses into consideration.

The players at the low limit hold’em tables were certainly a lot weaker on Friday and Saturday nights than they are on weeknights – which I suppose is likely to be the case everywhere these days. The flop percentages were noticably higher and the games I saw were much looser and more passive than I had seen previously. During the week, the tables were full of people who were clearly just playing by numbers to earn bonuses. At one point, while I was observing the play in order to pick a decent table, I actually saw eight hands in a row won by a pre-flop raise on a $1-$2 table. When you think about it, this doesn’t get anybody anywhere. The rake has to reach 25c to qualify as a raked hand and a pref-flop raise plus the blinds isn’t going to get near that.

Bet 365 certainly doesn’t look to me like a great place to play low limit hold’em on weeknights. The players are predominantly European, but even with an injection of north American players later in the evening (say after midnight GMT – 7pm ET), there still isn’t a great deal of choice on offer. Often the flop percentages are in the low-to-mid twenties, which can make the games pretty tedious unless you play maniacally. Unfortunately, that’s often when you start to see ‘implicit collusion’ slapping you around.

The bonus structure that they offer has a lot to do with this as well I believe. A $100 bonus each month per player for playing five hundred raked hands just encourages tight bonus-whoring players to sit there and rack up the hands while just aiming to break even. (Not that I’m in any position to criticise people for doing that). It’s no coincidence that you’ll frequently see articles on bonus-whoring mention Bet365 in the first paragraph as a good starting point to get a regular income going.

The other problem is that you’re allowed to wait at all tables at a particular limit until a certain specified number of players are seated. The end result is that you can often see the same five or six players all listed as ‘waiting’ on three different tables, but only one person has taken a seat, so nobody else is prepared to be the second or third player in. It’s a common problem at most sites (except perhaps Ultimate Bet where they give bonus points for being the first one in), but this ability to specify a minimum number of players before you enter really exacerbates the problem.

I think I’ll need to take a closer look at the NL tables. I’ve found that it’s usually possible to find a profitable NL game, even at sites where I’ve struggled to find a soft game because of the lack of European players (Full Tilt for example). Otherwise Bet365 will just be a part-time weekend thing for me.