White Belt Poker

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.

PartyGaming shares eventually went down by about a third yesterday, and took other companies down with them. There seem to be serious concerns about whether the online poker market is really going to continue to grow:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1564139,00.html

“Mr [Richard] Segal [PartyGaming CEO] also admitted that much of PartyGaming’s huge advertising splurge has been a waste of money. He said the group would now adopt “a rifle, not a shotgun” approach to marketing.

It wants to concentrate on retaining customers, studying their behaviour “to maximise lifetime player values”.

Yesterday’s numbers showed a drop in the yield per player per day of 7% to $17.80 (£9.65). Mr Segal said the site had suffered from offers of cash bonuses to poker players from rival operators.”

Apparently, it’s also somehow Joe Hachem’s fault for having the audacity to win the WSOP main event this year, despite not being an American male online qualifier.

The value of PartyGaming shares has gone down by 25% this morning because of concerns that profits can’t continue to grow as quickly as they have recently, and also because of the ever-present spectre of US government legal action.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1563656,00.html

I know an awful lot of stuff has been written about bots destroying online poker, but this article is quite interesting:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/pokerbots.html

I find the guy’s justification for selling the software extremely dubious and deeply unethical:

[Ray] Bornert had no ethical qualms about creating a poker bot. The way he saw it, the poker sites were duping people into believing that a game of hold ‘em online was as safe and secure as one at any casino in Vegas. “The reality is that the game changed the moment it moved to the Internet,” Bornert says. Bots and bot-aided collusion were inevitable. Rather than seduce anyone into thinking such things didn’t exist, Bornert had another notion: Put the power in the players’ hands. By democratizing computer-assisted firepower, he’d make it part of the competition. “It’s like football – if you don’t wear a helmet and pads, you’re going to get hurt,” he says. “A poker bot is your equipment.” And if that is considered unethical, then so be it. “I’d rather be unethical than be a victim,” he says. “This is intentional civil disobedience.”

This is nothing to do with the democratisation of technology, it’s about making money by cheating people. If stopping people being duped is really his concern then why not work on creating software that analyses betting patterns and behavior in order to sniff out bots? I might even think about buying that.

Ultimately, if everyone was using a bot to play limit hold’em, the game would be about programming skills rather than poker playing skills, in the same way that a sport with no drug testing would be about chemistry skill rather than physical ability.