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?

I received an email from Virgin Poker late last night telling me all about how they’re relaunching their site and their software on Wednesday 23rd November. It’s a little-known site; in fact I only heard about it because the Virgin group of companies like to cross-sell as much as possible and Virgin.net are my ISP, so I registered a few months ago but just played a few cheap multi-table tourneys for practice purposes. There were far too few players at the site to make it worth visiting regularly though, so I hadn’t been there for a while. The one unusual feature is that the games are all played in UK Pounds rather than US Dollars because WagerWorks (the gaming software company behind them) have been granted gambling licenses by the Alderney Gambling Control Commission in the Channel Islands.

As I say, Virgin Poker have been using software created by WagerWorks (also used by WPTonline.com, Paddy Power, Hard Rock Casino and others), but this email mentioned that you would need to register a new account, which makes me wonder whether they are going with an updated version of the WagerWorks software or whether they are switching to Prima or Crypto or someone else. Frankly , I hope they are moving. I’ve had real problems with the software crashing. I’d assumed that the client software was written in Java, but a bit of research tells me that in fact, it’s written in Flash!

The good news is that to make up for the need to register again, they are holding five $1000 freerolls this week, starting on Thursday. And there’s another clue that they are switching to a different software supplier – the prizes are suddenly being listed in US Dollars rather then UK Pounds.

The bad news for anyone outside Europe is that each freeroll tournament starts at 8pm (presumably GMT, which is 3pm ET). In the absence of any information about the format, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and assume we’ll be playing no-limit hold’em. That’ll be a few late nights of tournament poker for me this weekend then (and just when I was working on my limit game too), so it’s just as well that I’d already taken Friday off work. I should be able to play in the first three at least; assuming I still have the will to live after the first one of course.

Update: The Virgin Poker launch has gone ahead and they’ve moved from using Wagerworks to Boss Media. There’s a press release from the company here triumphantly announcing the switch.

I’m not familiar with the software, but it’s the same as The London Poker Club use (apparently). Looks quite appealing anyway.

Empire Online have announced this morning that they’ve broken off takeover negotiations with Party Gaming.

In a pretty scathing statement, the Empire directors say that they “intend to institute and vigorously pursue legal proceedings as soon as possible”.

I can understand the Empire directors being upset if Party are offering a lower price now that the Empire shares have dropped in value; especially when the shares dropped as a direct result of Party seeking to end the ‘skin’ deal the two companies had. Surely the Empire directors must have had a contingency plan if that happened though? They must have looked at the possibilty of moving onto the Prima or Cryptologic networks instead, if Party one day decided to pull the rug out.

So can we look forward to competitive sign-up and reload bonuses from Empire in the near future in order to build up their customer base? Fortunately for me, it’s one place I’ve never got around to playing at for some reason. Damn them! Am I doomed to a life of bonus whoring for the rest of my days?

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.