Posts Tagged ‘online poker’

Today is Sunday, but I won’t be playing the Sunday Million, because I’m currently in the United States.

For as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve started every year with a series of posts about my poker-related goals and resolutions, and I’ve ended every year by assessing the progress I made towards them. I set goals for 2011- my most ambitious ever, actually- but now it seems pointless to even look at them, as Black Fridayrendered them more or less irrelevant.  The best laid plans of mice and men, eh?

A dark omen in Montreal.

I’m not really in a place to start setting poker goals for this year, either, since I have no idea what the year will look like for me, poker-wise or otherwise. Not since my final semester of college have I felt this level of anxiety and uncertainty about my future. Those Big Questions are back: Where will I live? What will I do? Who will the people around me be?

I’ve spent the last week and and a half fending off questions, some idle and some concerned, at various gatherings of friends and family. My recent life as a nomadic poker professional was strange enough to them that they’ve learned to accept without alarm the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be two weeks from now.  Read the complete post...

I can get jaded about poker sometimes, so wrapped up in improving and maximizing my hourly rate that I lose sight of what is fun about this game and what is remarkable about its internet incarnation. Then PokerStars rolls out something like the Red Spade Open that, if you stop to think about it, should make your head spin. This is a tournament with a $55 entry fee and a MILLION DOLLAR guaranteed prize pool.

More than 20,000 players from around the world will all compete in the same tournament, at the same time. In a matter of hours and through the magic of the internet, a few lucky players will turn $55 (or less, obviously there are tons of satellites and an FPP buy-in option) into six figures. Of course a few people do that every week in the lottery, but this is a competition where skill matters, where at least some players will actually have a positive expected value, and where rather than raking a massive cut of the prize pool the way a state lottery does, PokerStars is actually adding money via bounties on myself and the other Red Spade pros.

The tournament takes place this Sunday, November 20th, at 3PM Eastern. Even though we’ve never met and live on opposite ends of the Earth, you’ll have the chance to compete against me and win a bounty for busting me. I think that’s pretty cool.

Sorry I’ve been so slow in posting this. I didn’t want to talk about this at all before everything was squared away, and then as you’ll see it ended up taking me a long time to tell the story of how I ended up back on PokerStars and playing from Montreal. I’m going to post it in two parts; here’s the first:

One of my first thoughts, upon hearing the news of April 15th, was that I was suddenly going to have a lot of time on my hands. My girlfriend and I were already going to a wedding in North Carolina, and we quickly made plans tovisit friends New York and invited another couple up to visit us in Boston, and . Then I began to realize that actually there were some poker-related things that I ought to do, such as go to Madrid for the EPT event there, and that our lease in Boston was up at the end of May.  Read the complete post...

Part trip report, part sequel to “Gray Friday“, “Three Days in Madrid” is my latest article for the Two Plus Two Poker Magazine:

My heart beat eagerly as my eyes scanned the waiting crowd at Madrid-Barajas Airport. It’s nice to know that, after nine hours of traveling, there is a friendly face seeking out you amidst the anonymous crowd, but there was more to my anxiousness than that. The face I was looking for wasn’t exactly familiar: I’d seen it only once, in a photograph. But if Nico wasn’t here, I was going to be seriously screwed, with little money, even less knowledge of the local language, and no plan for getting to my hotel.

It tells the story of my first three days (though actually most of the best stories are from the nights) in Madrid, including significant hands that I played on Day 1A of the European Poker Tour Grand Final. Of course, I spent more than three days in Madrid, but the article is long enough as it is. I plan to share a few more stories on this blog in the coming days, so if you enjoy the article, keep any eye on this page for bonus material!

My current 2+2 Magazine article, Gray Friday, is one of the most personal I’ve published. It’s about what was going through my head around the time of the online poker indictments and by extension a reflection on my relationship to online poker in general:

It still seems surreal to me, so many years later, that I can make any living, let alone such an extravagant one, clicking buttons on a computer screen. What purpose does this serve? Who is helped by my facility with hand reading, range analysis, and turn overbetting? Would the world, or even any person other than myself, be any worse off if I were no longer able to ply my “trade”? We may be about to find out.

The whole thing has always felt too good to be true, and now I feel like I am waking up from a dream. Something about this seems right and proper, in a cosmic sense, like someone has finally realized I’ve been getting away with something for too long.

A Hungarian poker site picked up on my recent post about money disappearing from my old UB account. Curious to see what they said, our Esteemed Webmistress ran it through Google Translate. Playing around with GT is always fun, and I especially like seeing what happens when you translate from English into another language and then back to English.

In this case, GT employed much better phraseology than I did. This is an excerpt from the de-translation of the excerpt from my blog that was quoted in Hungarian on the site. Note the bolded phrase, which I swear I am not making up:

“Yesterday I accidentally found it in a spam email in Mail, which informs me that my account is $ 1,040.26.The letter 2010th February 19 dátumozású was only yesterday, but stumbled as the spam filter caught. I thought this is something a refund of the UB Hall of frauds.”

In response to my recent The Poker Ethicist: HUDs post, Piefarmer left an interesting comment that got me thinking about a few more of the ethical dimensions surrounding HUDs and other technology that helps people play better poker:

Technology always pushes the boundaries, especially ethical boundaries. The primary way to think about these boundaries, I think, is the way Andrew presented them: Does everyone have the same understanding of what is allowed, and the same opportunity to use technologies which are allowed? If so, no ethical problem.

I think the conditions that he identifies are spot-on, and I want to delve a bit deeper into them. This time around I’ve got more questions than answers, so I’ll be very curious to hear your opinions on the subject.

The Right To Know

My claim is that use of any technology allowed by the rules of a casino or poker site is ethical, and that using anything disallowed is unethical. This is because, by choosing to play at a particular venue, players agree to both their host and their fellow players that they will follow the posted rules.  Read the complete post...

As “The Poker Philosopher”, and in honor of one of my favorite non-poker blogs, I occasionally consider the ethical dimensions of a high-profile controversy in the poker community. In this edition, I address a long-standing controversy in the online poker world, in response to a question about Heads-Up Displays (HUD’s) posed in a recent comment. Older editions of The Poker Ethicist are available in the archives.

In response to a recent post I made about using a HUD, commenter “Elmer Fudd” asked,

“I would like you to comment on the ethics of using a HUD in the first place. It most certainly gives you an edge over players that don’t use such software and provides you with stats that you couldn’t readily obtain during a live game. I guess I’m an old-fashioned poker purist, but anything that gives you a slight edge over other players is cheating. “

I would say anything that gives you an unfair edge is cheating. Sleeping and eating better than my opponents gives me an edge. Reading more books than they do gives me an edge. Using a second monitor gives me an edge over opponents attempting to multi-table on a single monitor. Yet none of these is unfair, because my opponents have equal opportunity to take advantage of them.  Read the complete post...