White Belt Poker

A couple of weeks ago, I heard about a new British-based online poker room that’s due to open up in the next few months that is making bold claims about revolutionising online poker software. It’s called PKR.com and after a quick glance at the screenshots and the video trailer it’s obvious why the company are talking about a revolution. The in-game footage is very reminiscent of a couple of recent console games – WPT and Stacked. The 3d software looks jaw-droppingly good – perhaps even better than the aforementioned video games, so I’m looking forward to getting a chance to beta-test it soon. Last time I checked, their beta test signup is still open to anyone who wants to take part.

The obvious concern is that 3d poker software has been tried before, with limited success. I know Noble Poker tried it and eventually withdrew it, possibly because it was buggy, although it looked great. I should think that a broadband connection has to be a pre-requisite for the 3d views and even then, will the old problems of ‘lag’ with 3d online gaming become apparent too? It’ll be interesting to see. Given the people in charge, I’m sure they’re aware of this, but more on that later. It is apparently possible to choose camera angles around the table, so it’s perfectly possible to play just from an overhead view just like everywhere else.

Of course, just having great software isn’t going to be enough to make Pkr.com a success. They’ll need to attract large numbers of players, preferably bad players. After all, a poker site is only as good as the bad players it attracts. Reel in the fish and the sharks will follow as well. There was some scepticism on a recent 2+2 Forum thread, but I think this could be a real fish magnet. The cool software will draw in bad players and inexperienced players and it’ll bring in video gamers who may not have played online before. That leads me nicely on to mentioning some of the people behind Pkr.com, who have certainly come from the games industry.

There are some very interesting people involved in PKR, which makes me think they’ve got a good chance of succeeding with what they’re trying to do. First of all, there’s CEO Jez San, who has a long history in the video games industry, having written his first games for the Commodore 64 and Amiga while in his teens, before founding his own company Argonaut Games, and subsequently being involved with several software companies that have produced console and mobile games. (Thirty-something video game geeks like me may be interested to know that San was involved in developing the Super FX chip which allowed the then-revolutionary 3d scrolling shooter Star Fox to be released on the SuperNES). San eventually becoming the first person ever to be awarded an OBE for services to the computer game industry in 2002.

The company’s COO is Leon Walters, who I believe was the Executive Producer of SWAT: Global Strike Team which was a first-person shooter (in the Rainbow Six mould) released for Xbox and PS2 in 2003, which featured a very striking 3d game engine. Have you spotted the 3d game theme here yet?

Also involved as VP Marketing is Simon Prodger, former Product Marketing Manager of Victor Chandler Poker who as well as having the obvious experience with one the biggest British poker sites has also written a few articles about online poker himself, including here and here.

Overall, this is definitely a site I’ll be keeping an eye on. It’ll be very interesting to see how good the software is and how the company plan to position themselves in what is a very crowded marketplace.

UPDATE: There are rumours that Phil Laak and Jennifer Tilly have signed up to represent PKR.com, although the PKR.com site hasn’t confirmed it yet.
[tags]online poker, pkr.com, poker software[/tags]

Channel 5 here in the UK showed the second semi-final of the Party Poker European Open a few days ago. Host Jesse May has been introducing a series of thirty-second instructional clips from Phil Hellmuth each week. It’s obvious stuff usually, but the latest one is stunning because (drum roll please) it features Phil Hellmuth giving a lecture about … how to avoid going on tilt!!

Here’s a transcript, including Jesse’s deeply sarcastic segue:

Jesse: Tilt is tough, there’s no doubt about it. But one player who knows a bit about tilt – in fact he’s the only person in the world who eats breakfast on tilt – former world champion Phil Hellmuth.

(Cut to Phil)

Phil: Playing on tilt. Showing emotion at the table. (Sarcastically) Now I wouldn’t know anything about that! I get very emotional at the table and sometimes it costs me a lot of chips. Sometimes though, I can act emotional when I’m really strong. So I think that controlling tilt is an important thing. Letting your emotions flow is an important thing too. But you can’t let it affect the way you play your hands. So if you feel you’re on tilt, count your chips. (Phil mimes counting chips). That’s simple, it puts your mind back in the game. Count your chips a couple of times, then maybe pick up your cards with just your left hand. When you do that, you tend to fold more. Those are two good ways to get off tilt.

–

Quite what left-handed players are meant to do in this situation, I don’t know. Just don’t let tilt affect the way you play your hands folks!! You heard the man.

[tags]Jesse May, Phil Hellmuth, poker, tilt[/tags]

At a time when two online poker players (ZeeJustin and JJProdigy) have recently been publicly exposed as multiple account-using cheats, I co-incidently received an email from Amazon.co.uk a few days ago about the latest book by famous “retired” casino cheat Richard Marcus, which went like this:

We’ve noticed that customers who have previously purchased books by Ed Miller have also ordered Dirty Poker: The Poker Underworld Exposed by Richard Marcus.

I’m sure Ed would love that. It shows that I’ve bought at least one of his books though I suppose. And a quick check on the site shows that the same people are buying Dan Harrington’s books and Super/System too.

This bit from the book’s description caught my eye in particular:

Cheating in poker is more common than people care to believe. In fact, it’s rampant. Especially online and in major international tournaments including the WORLD SERIES OF POKER in Las Vegas, not to mention regulated public cardrooms.

I should point out that I did not add those capital letters – that’s exactly how it was written.

Essentially, Marcus’s argument is the same as the one used by that guy who was selling his wonderful poker bot software last year – it’s a public service; they’re doing us a favour by giving us the information we need to avoid getting ripped off by unscrupulous players and/or casinos. And if we could just see our way to throwing them a few bucks, y’know, that would be nice too. I’m sure Marcus didn’t write the book’s back page blurb himself, but it is hugely overstating the problem to use the word ‘rampant’. Then again, I would imagine that his publishers are angling him towards doing revealing interviews with the sunday broadsheet newspapers in the week before the book’s UK launch, so the hyperbole is hardly surprising really. There’ll be daytime chat show appearances too no doubt, where he’ll be pitched against someone from the gambling industry. From what I’d already read about Marcus though, a lot of his cheating was past-posting at roulette tables rather than at the poker tables, so clearly he’s also open to the allegation that he’s just trying to make money off the current poker boom.

Whatever Richard Marcus’s motivation for writing the book, the point about cheating is not whether cheating goes on in poker – obviously it does to a limited extent – but whether or not the casinos do anything about it, and at a time when the two biggest online poker rooms have just acted to close the accounts of two cheating players and confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars from them, simply repeating this ‘rampant cheating’ mantra is just going to illicit a shrug of the shoulders from anyone who follows the game. But then maybe that’s the point – he’s not trying to sell the book to experienced players. It’s aimed at the beginners and particularly the losing players who want to blame the casinos and the cheating players for their losses rather than taking responsibility for their own bad play. Then we have the anti-gambling campaigners helping out the know-nothing talk radio and chat show hosts who are desperate for sensationalist material that might keep their listeners awake until the next ad break. These are people who want to hear that poker is completely corrupt. Tell someone something they already know and they’ll thank you for it.

Of course, if you were being cynical you could say that from a business perspective Poker Stars needed to be seen to be doing something about cheating after Party dealt with ZeeJustin so ruthlessly, because the two are competing to be the biggest poker room at the moment. There is the obvious question of why Poker Stars hadn’t already spotted Justin cheating themselves (especially if the evidence was “incontrovertible” as Lee Jones has written) instead of just waiting until after Party had busted him. There is also the bad taste left over from their poor handling of the Noah Boeken “El Capitano” incident last year where Boeken admitted to playing two accounts in a Sunday 500k tournament which he subsequently won, during the Tournament Leader Board madness last summer, which led directly to Poker Stars changing their MTT rules.

There has been some debate about whether what Boeken did was any different to ZeeJustin and JJProdigy’s actions. There’s an interesting exchange between MissT74 and Poker Stars on her blog in which Lee Jones effectively admits that Boeken would have been treated the same but there weren’t specifically any rules in place to deal with the situation at the time. Then again MissT74 posted her email to Poker Stars on RGP, which led me to an interesting account of a recent Poker Stars investigation which shows how seriously they are taking this issue. Ultimately, if a particular poker room doesn’t take these issues seriously then players will just drift away and play elsewhere. Thankfully, the big companies seem to have realised this now. Frankly, anyone who gets caught after the recent flurry of activity deserves everything they get.