Playing Poker From Behind the Curtain?

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Yes, I’m starting to believe my drought has really ended. Last night I tried playing two .50/$1 tables but Paradise couldn’t seem to keep a second table full and the number of players kept fluctuating from four to six. Luckily I had jumped on one that stayed pretty solid at ten players so I kept that table and decided to jump up to $1/$2 on a second table. I eked out a small win at $1/$2 and another minor win at .50/$1 that overall translated into about +15BB over approx. 350 hands.

Ok, completely changing topic here but here’s a question I was hoping someone might be able to answer; What would be the best way to get around IP blocking by an ISP? Here’s the deal, I know some folks who live in a country (who shall remain nameless) that blocks access to gambling sites. I’ll be visiting there and want to play but all of the local ISP’s block traffic to and from sites that engage in gambling. My first thought was to do some sort of SSH port forwarding to my server (which should be considered a non-offending IP address) but there’s no way to monkey with the networking settings in the Party or Paradise clients. The closest I could come to finding any sort of config file was on Paradise:

;********************************************************************
;*
;*      ParadisePoker.com client settings file
;*
;*      Do NOT mess with this file unless you know what you're doing.
;*
;********************************************************************

;--- Globals ---

PortNumber_SSL=26002            ; TCP/IP port number we connect on for SSLv3/TLSv1 encrypted connections
InitialConnectionTimeout=10     ; # of seconds after connect() before we give up on a socket.

So it seems if you could forward port 26002 to localhost on your local machine rather than the Paradise servers this should be possible. Party has a config file but it seems to be in some sort of non-text format which I didn’t even want to get into dealing with.

I guess you could just go into the hosts file and redirect paradisepoker.com to 127.0.0.1 (the localhost) but that’s assuming that they run everything off of the same server. If they have game1.paradisepoker.com and game2.paradisepoker.com for load balancing you’ll have to basically weather the trial and error approach.

A last resort might be some sort of proxy server running on a “safe” IP but that seems like a bit of a pain in the butt just to play a little Hold ‘Em. Any other suggestions out there?

Also, on a related, unrelated note: Has anybody customized his or her Party or Paradise software? All of the images, sounds, etc. are stored locally on your machine so you could, in theory, change them the way you change your desktop wallpaper. For instance, instead of the fireworks sound that plays when you win a pot on Party you could change that to any audio file you wanted (Queen’s ‘We are the Champions’ seems like a possible alternative ). You could even change the avatars used on Party to something more interesting if you had the time and desire. I’m guessing that every upgrade by Paradise or Poker might change things back (I’ve noticed graphic images being downloaded during upgrades) but it should be easy to re-customize everything once you got it set up.

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