White Belt Poker

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.