White Belt Poker

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 just remembered yesterday that the EPT returns on September 13th in Barcelona.

PokerStars appear to have exclusive rights to offer satellite qualifying tournaments, although I’m not certain about that. I can’t recall getting any emails from any of the other places that I play about EPT events anyway.

I’ve decided to take a crack at qualifying for the London event at the end of September and perhaps for some of the other events after that. I’ve been looking for a target after several months of just kind of drifting along, so now I’ve found one.

PokerStars is one of the places where I don’t already have an account. I like the look of their software though and the hand histories can be automatically loaded into Poker Tracker too.

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.

I’m not sure how, but a few days ago I ended up at a site offering something called the “Power Poker System”. The site was full of outlandish claims about how it would instantly transform your game and how they strictly limit the amount of copies that they can sell because it’s so explosively good. It all had the feel of a get-rich-quick scheme or an infomercial for a miraculous kitchen gadget, and with a ludicrous price tag of over £100 I was about to dismiss it – until I noticed some of the names involved.

The guide had been written by esteemed poker writer and commentator Jesse May. Also involved where players of the calibre of Padraig Parkinson and Julian Gardner. Parkinson and May had featured quite heavily as commentators on the recent Party Poker World Open that was show here in the UK on channel five. I was surprised to learn that although Padraig was often keen to play down his own playing abilities while commentating, he had in fact come very close to winning the WSOP main event a few years ago.

The fact that these guys were involved at least made it worth investigating. So I had a look around for reviews. I found a post on the 2+2 forums which mentioned it. Many people were critical – both of the contents and the price – although I felt that most of the critics hadn’t seen the thing anyway.