White Belt Poker

The geeks amongst you may already know about digg.com. In their own words it’s a “technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control” – so now you know.

Anyway, those of us who play poker regularly (particularly online) are accustomed to dealing with the usual “online poker is rigged”, “bots are cheating you” type of post on internet forums. The people who post this stuff get laughed at and/or flamed to a crisp by the cognoscenti, but I was interested to discover this thread on a non-poker site (the aforementioned digg.com) which links to an article that was original published in that hateful rag the Mail On Sunday.

The comments on the thread show that there’s a large amount of ignorance about poker amongst those who are not involved (and even some who are). Here’s a sample:

Interesting/informative read. Makes me glad I never got into it.

There are corrupt people involved in Gambling?!? My word! Innocence is shattered!

I think anyone who plays online poker is just asking to get hosed. The system can be rigged and you’d never know. Gambling in general is a tax on the stupid.

its too bad the author doesn’t mention how the sites are rigged, especially pp and ub.

So that’s us put in our place then!! In fairness, there are some sensible, intelligent comments as well, some of which point out that teams and collusion are a much bigger threat than bots, so it’s not all idiots. The publishers of the original article should get their arses kicked though for actually giving Ray Bonhert more publicity and actually putting a fucking link to his tawdy little piece of cheating software at the bottom of the article!!! Hmm, I wonder if I could complain to the Press Complaints Commission?