Bill's Poker Blog

Only in Online Poker

Bill Rini — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:32:05 +0000

Costa Rica – Bodog announced today that they have just released a new version of their online poker software with a revolutionious new feature called, “No Decision Poker.” According to a press release, No Decision Poker essentially removes the “Fold” button as an option for Recreational Players™ .

Jonas “Don King” Odman said, “No Decision Poker is a magnormous advancement in poker that only a braveflurious poker room like Bodog can introduce to the poker playing community. Recreational Players™ will soon have the choice of escaping the tyranny of making decisions at the poker table. Our amazingpendious software removes all decision making. Players play every hand to the river pushing chips back and forth until they’ve all been raked up.”

Odman went on to explain why decision making is bad in poker. “What is the one major advantage that those rapscalliontatious sharp players bring to the table that allows them to ravencaciously rip hard earned cash out of the hands of ~~Calvin Ayre~~ our Recreational Players™ ? Decision making. Sharp players besmirchify the integrity of the game by making better decisions than Recreational Players™ .

Eliminating usernames, HUDs, PokerTracker, and the other tools used by these tricktarious sharpies only can go so far. To truly decimate their supflirious edge is to remove the one true advantage they have over Recreational Players™ .”

Bodog won’t be resting on its laurels for very long though. Odman also outlined future plans for Bodog. “After conducting a compendious analysis of how to provide the maximum, most suplurative value to our Recreational Players™, we plan on eliminating poker game play altogether. Our Recreational Players™ won’t have to play against those demonic jackals from hell. They’ll have the mandatory option of direct-debiting their bank accounts each month and we’ll just deduct what we think they should have won and send it back to them.”

Odman continued, “In the Bodog Recreational Player™ Poker Ecosystem™, which we alone created, we’re aiming for only having 2 or 3 poker players on the entire network. We’re looking for just a few elephantious sized players who love poker but just don’t have the time, skill, desire, or inclination to actually play. We remove the playing burden from these players which frees up their time to read the highest trafficked website ever in existance, the CalvinAyre.com blog, which is more social and fun than playing poker in the first place.”

“Our success can be measured not in how many players we have on our network but how few. It’s ridonkulous to think that people want to look at numbers and pictures on cards and still end up losing all of their money chasing runner-runner draws. We’re moving extremely fectaculosity towards our eventual goal of having less than 10 players site wide.”

Bodog CEO, Patrik Selin reiterated Odman’s points saying, “We’re the contrarian play in online poker. Everyone else is adding liquidity, improving their software, and trying to provide a pleasurable gaming experience but we don’t think about poker like that.”

“If I were running Facebook, I’m sure I could turn that into a million dollar company using the same approach. Facebook wastes a lot of resources trying to deliver an experience that people enjoy. You cut out that overhead and everything else is pure profit.”

Full Tilt

Bill Rini — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:23:28 +0000

Was at the Irvine Spectrum Center earlier this week and ran into this sign hanging in a window. Related Posts Full Tilt Launches Pro Chat What’s Next for Full Tilt Poker? Full Tilt on the Mac WPBT / Full Tilt Poker WSOP Fantasy League 10 Best Full Tilt Poker Screen Names

Daniel Negreanu Speaks Out on Full Tilt

Bill Rini — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:27:47 +0000

Great video . . . unless your last name is Bitar, Ferguson, or Lederer. Daniel Negreanu comes out with both guns blazing as he takes Full Tilt executives and owners to task for their continued silence on the issue of the downfall of the online poker site and when players will ever see any cash.

I have to agree. A simple, “We’re sorry,” or some sort of message showing any amount of sympathy with the players who have hundreds of millions of dollars locked up on Full Tilt would go a long way. It also doesn’t help their reputation when they all claim they can’t speak due to pending legal issues but they have no problem taking the offensive when Ivey sues them or the DOJ calls them a Ponzi scheme. Then, they can say whatever they want. But when the topic is coming clean on what happened to people’s money . . . crickets.

Change Your Value Lines by David Yee

Bill Rini — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:25:16 +0000

Editor’s Note: David contacted me awhile back asking for advice on how to break into the online poker industry. If you’ve got something open and David seems like a good fit, feel free to contact him using his details in the byline.

Everybody knows of the old passive 80 year old recreational player at the casino. He limps sporadically, checks every hand, will never make a move ever pre flop- unless he has Aces. You laugh to yourself and ask “who would ever pay this guy off? He only ever 3-bets Aces and no other hand.”

Oftentimes, players make the same play as the old nit without even knowing it. Take for instance this short example:

Example 1:

9 handed, 100bb stacks

Preflop: UTG (unknown) raises 4xbb with AA. All fold to the SB with 66, who calls.
Flop: 6d Td 4c

SB checks, UTG bets 2/3rds pot, SB raises 3x his bet.

Am I saying this is a bad line from the SB? No. Everything has a time and a place and for many, this is very standard. In most cases, we can assume SB is rarely bluffing. UTG realizes this and alarm bells are setting off- what value hands does he beat?

What should SB do instead? Let us first evaluate UTG’s range:

Range: It is 9 handed and he’s UTG. This alone should restrict his range to nut-heavy hands (AK, TT+). If he’s nittier, sometimes not even TT or JJ. This flop is wet and many players won’t fire here with AK (AKdd is an obvious exception). There are not many suited connector hands in his range either (78 type hands are probably not there, given he raised UTG). The only flush draw possibilities are KQdd/QJdd/AKdd/AQdd, and he doesn’t necessarily raise all of those preflop, either.

So, with that stated, we can conclude that villain is most likely raising preflop (and betting this flop) with a very strong range- Most likely an overpair. Smart players will recognize this. And alternately, if UTG is smart, he will recognize this as well. He will know that SB’s range is very strong; maybe even stronger than his own. And he will probably fold sometime before the river.

What is another way to play this hand from SB’s spot with the set?

Option 1: Check/call-

Why are we check/calling? We check/call because:

Despite the board being draw heavy, his range is more weighted towards strong 1-pair hands as opposed to draws.
It helps us balance our check/calling range a bit. If we sometimes check/call with something like 88 on this board (and other medium hands), having stronger hands will help with that.
It allows us to get more value against smarter opponents. If we are playing against weak players, then check/raising is a better option. But against smarter opponents, check/calling may be better. Think about UTG’s thinking if we check/call the flop:

“SB check/called the flop. He surely must have some draw or weak hand. My plan is to bet the flop, bet the turn, and probably bet the river. He might have some weak top pair hand that will call me down. He would surely check/raise the flop with a set on such a draw-heavy board.”

Problems with check/calling the flop in example 1:

Wet board could lead to some potential problems on the turn. If the flush or straight card hits, villain may check behind if we check to him. Those straight/flush cards can kill our action occasionally. With that said, there WILL be a chance that villain may semi bluff a flush card if he has the lone Ad/Kd/Qd, which obviously presents a nice opportunity for us as well.
Villain might be a very passive player who will not bet often when checked to. Obviously against some of these players, we should reconsider our flop decision.

Option 2: Leading (donking)-

Leading into UTG is a definite option as well.

It allows us to retake the initiative from UTG. We dictate the action now and can bet/bet/bet or do something else.
Though it looks stronger, it still does not look as strong as check/raising. Thus villain can still call us down and not be as afraid.
It might induce villain to raise our flop lead and give us more action than otherwise.

Conclusion: Generally, players are constantly picking up on tendencies of other players. This is especially true in a live setting. When playing against players who have an idea of what they are doing, consider changing the way in which you play your hand. Don’t necessarily look only at the board texture and assume you must ‘protect your hand’.

————–

David Yee has been playing semi-professionally for the past five years. He is a coach on DeucesCracked and moderator on twoplustwo.com. He can be reached at dkyee1@gmail.com and blogs at www.orange87.com

Gambling is Dangerous

Bill Rini — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:20:00 +0000

I ran across this piece of advice on Yahoo Answers. The asker posed the question:

Do you have any advice on playing poker?

I have played a lot of internet poker as well as with the Amateur Poker League but it has never been for real money. Always just chips. Tomorrow night I’m probably going to be playing for real. Any tips?

Here’s one of the answers:

remember casinos use shills , marked cards, trick dealers and will treathen your life if you win to much to often. casinos are very dangeras places ,if your girlfriend is pretty she may be drug-ed and within a week she will be working in a whore house with no knowledge of how it happened.
the people you watch on TV are all friends and make side deals most of the games are just for show
gaming commissions do nothing because the states need the money

advice ,play small, leave early be glad if you survive the mob is very real,

First off, I try to avoid taking advice from people who don’t know how to use capitalization or know the difference between “to” and “too” but you have to admit that is some scary advice. I’ve probably lost 15 or 20 girlfriends in casinos before. I always thought they grew tired of me but now I know they were all drugged and working in a whorehouse.

Better yet, he lists as his source of this information:

25 years of experiance in the casino industry

How much you wanna bet this guy also thinks online poker is rigged?

Weeding Out The Weak

Bill Rini — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:35:02 +0000

You would think that by this stage in the evolution in the online poker industry people like this would be unable to find jobs. Sadly, they’re still out there. And they’re still spamming poker websites with crap like this.

Subject: business proposal

Message Body:
HI PARTNER,
DO YOU KNOW XXXXXXX NETWORK?

XXXXXX IS ONE OF MORE IMPORTANT POKER NETWORK IN THE WORLD, WE HAVE MORE THAN 100 SKIN AFFILIATE ALL OVER EUROPE AND THOUSANDS OF PLAYERS ON LINE, BUT OUR REAL STRENGTH ARE VERY HIGH COMMISSIONS TO OUR AFFILIATES AND MANY TOURNAMENTS DAILY….

IF YOU WANT TO WORK WITH U.S. WITH A YOUR PERSONAL WEBSITE (SKIN) OR AS A SIMPLE AGENT, CONTACT U.S. WITH MAIL OR WITH SKYPE (XXXXXXXXX).

WE WILL FIND THE RIGHT SOLUTION FOR YOU!

Marketing Office
XXXXXXXXXX
Malta

I was going to do my usual deconstruction of this Epic FAIL but, dammit, the FAIL speaks for itself. Who writes “us” as “U.S.”?

Trying to Unsubscribe From Zynga Email Alerts

Bill Rini — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:43:01 +0000

I’m not sure why I’ve recently started to get a ton of Zynga emails telling me my friends are playing the latest and greatest Zynga game and want to invite me to play too. Regardless of the reason, I was tired of getting spammed so I clicked on the Unsubscribe option at the bottom of one of the emails. Below are the options on the webpage the link sent me to.

I’m at a total loss as to what the differences are between the options.

I’d like to unsubscribe from Zynga emails.

Yes, I would like to unsubscribe from all Zynga emails.

I’d like to unsubscribe from ALL Zynga emails.

Wait, what the hell is the difference between unsubscribing from Zynga emails and unsubscribing from ALL Zynga emails? Isn’t that the same thing? Are there Zynga emails and then some sort of other form of Zynga emails?

I’d like to unsubscribe from ALL Zynga emails. I do not want to receive emails from any Zynga game I play or any new Zynga game.

WTF?!?! Okay, the first sentence is the same as the option above it but what the heck does that second sentence mean? So are there Zynga emails, ALL Zynga emails, Zynga emails from games I play, and new Zynga game emails?

How much does anyone want to bet that no matter what option you select, Zynga will come up with a new category of emails to send you that somehow isn’t covered by any of the three above? Sort of like, “Hey, we know you said you didn’t want to receive any sort of communication from us under any circumstances but . . .”

ANY2LDO

Bill Rini — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:40:50 +0000

Saw this outside a shopping mall a few months ago. Finally got around to downloading the pics off my iPhone :-)

The Death of Poker Media?

Bill Rini — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:33:17 +0000

I swung by Commerce last weekend to get in a little Omaha and, as is my habit, I picked up copies of CardPlayer and PokerPlayer magazines which are always available in the casino. It’s a habit that goes back for nearly as long as I’ve played live poker in the local Los Angeles poker rooms.

When I was a beginning player I loved reading the strategy articles. I always enjoyed Roy Cooke and the other authors handing over little tidbits of advice on how to improve your poker game.

After I got involved in the online poker industry, I started to pick up the magazines to see who was advertising what promotions. They became more like industry or competitor research. I still found the articles interesting but poker on the internet had exploded by that time and there was more poker strategy articles available than one human being could ever possibly consume.

As I picked up the most recent editions of these two great poker publications I noticed they seemed a tad light. Very light.

Of course, light is relative. The last time I was a semi-regular in the LA card rooms was back in 2006 before I left for Gibraltar. Back then a copy of CardPlayer magazine was pretty hefty. How hefty, I don’t know because I never really took the time to inventory the magazine but I remember it being thick enough that it was too big to fold up or easily slip into your pocket.

That’s not the case today. The Jan 25, 2012 (Vol 25/No 2) edition of CardPlayer that I was holding was a mere 68 pages (including front and back covers). I was able to fold it over twice and put it in my jacket breast pocket.

It got me curious so I sat down and really looked at what was in these 68 pages.

Front Cover: 1 page
Masthead: 1 page
TOC: 1 page
Advertising Index: 1 page
Tourney Schedule: 5.5 pages
Advertising: 28 pages
Content: 30.5 pages

Only four online poker rooms had ads in CardPlayer; Lock Poker, Poker Host, America’s Poker, and Carbon Poker. CardPlayer had a full-page ad for their own free poker site but I don’t really count that since it’s a house ad. In total, seven pages were purchased by online poker sites.

Ads for land based casinos made up 19 full pages.

The remaining two pages consisted of smaller ads for things like CardPlayer Cruises, CP Poker School, Kardwell playing cards, Poker Media Consulting, etc.

Before I go any further I want to make it very clear that I am not singling out CardPlayer. As I browse around online poker news sites I notice a scarcity of any sort of advertising. It’s an industry-wide issue.

Part of the problem is that many poker media outlets got too fat on affiliate fees and placement fees. The amount of money online poker sites were willing to shell out for premium placement of their affiliate ads on the biggest poker media sites (both print and online) simply couldn’t and can’t be matched by any other sort of advertiser.

Many print magazines just kept adding pages and pages to their magazines in order to accommodate all of the people who wanted to advertise. Online sites sold out their inventory and then began charging poker sites an insertion or placement fee for increased exposure on their site.

This left little room for any sort of diversification of advertising income streams. In other words, GM, Coca Cola, Budweiser, and any other non-poker related advertiser were priced out of the market. When Black Friday hit there were no unaffected advertisers on the poker media customer list. All their bets were on online poker.

Granted, selling online poker to Corporate America was never an easy task. Not only were they priced out of the market but there is/was the issue of associating their brands with something that was, at best, morally objectionable and, at worst, blatantly illegal.

But that raises the issue of cause and effect. Was Corporate America scared away from associating their brands with poker or were they scared away from associating their brands with poker media that closely associated itself with online poker?

One could make the argument that poker is already somewhat acceptable to Corporate America. ESPN has an entire section dedicated to poker. Many newspapers carry syndicated poker content. They don’t give this exposure to poker out of the kindness of their hearts. They do it because, in theory, they are able to make money from it. Some advertiser is buying an ad on that syndicated column which makes it, in theory, profitable for them to pay the author for the content.

In some ways it reminds me of the dotcom crash. I remember when Yahoo was commanding super-premiums just to get your ad on their website. And just a few years later their sales dropped like a rock wen the dotcoms crashed.

Was it because nobody was advertising online? Ehrm, well, sort of. The problem was that the stupid dotcoms, flush with investor cash, stopped outbidding each other for prime Yahoo real estate when the money dried up. Since that was the only type of business Yahoo had been accustomed to, their sales reps were unaware that the phones dialed out as well as in. Their sales reps had never courted customers before. They were order takers.

The dotcom crash hit them hard because they weren’t organizationally structured to go out, hat in hand, begging for business. Likewise, I think the poker world needs to wake up to the fact that ads aren’t going to sell themselves. If the phone isn’t ringing the sales reps need to be hitting the phones and the pavement selling the ad space.

But are any of them doing that? Not from what I can see. I visited several of the largest online poker news sites and they’re all running ads for online poker sites. Some, even though I’m accessing the site from the US, are running ads for sites that aren’t even available to US players. One news site, which shall remain nameless, still has links to Full Tilt, UB, and Absolute room reviews in their footer (in their defense, they link to 404, page not found, pages).

I find it difficult to believe that this ad space can’t be sold to non-poker related businesses. The demographic of poker players is a highly coveted demographic for advertisers.

Or has the poker media yet to come to terms with the fact that the days of easy cash are over? Are they holding on, waiting for US legalization, hoping to command those outrageous premiums again? Have they burned their bridges to the legitimate world so badly nobody in Corporate America wants to touch them?

Whatever the answer, the one thing I do know, is the market weeds out those that fail to adapt. There are plenty of flamed out dotcoms that could have survived if they would have read the writing on the wall. Now all we can do is sit back and see who is paying attention to the winds of change and who is doubling down on their bets.

Guaranteed Solution To Stop Sharks From Eating Sports Book Fish

Bill Rini — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:11:34 +0000

Don’t offer poker!!!

Really. It’s that simple.

Most sports books offer poker to their customers as a way to keep players from discovering other poker sites. They understand the tendency for there to be cross-over players from sports betting to poker and they’ve attempted to keep their sports book players from wandering off to other sites for their poker playing.

That’s all fine and dandy but there’s an attitude in the industry that the sports book owns that customer or at least that customer’s betting action, which is an incorrect assumption. It’s sort of like your local cable company selling you bundled internet, cable television, and phone and then getting upset when you start canceling your premium cable channels because you’re spending too much time on the internet to watch as much television as you used to.

Rather than improving their cable channel lineup or providing you extra value, now the cable company wants to restrict your use of the internet in the hopes that you’ll spend more time watching television and move back up to your old package. They call their new internet offering, Enhanced Internet, and claim they are removing the internet’s clutter out of your way. Of course, Enhanced Internet involves blocking YouTube, Facebook, and downloading of movies and music.

That’s basically what’s happening right now with sports book customers. They’re being sold a bundle of gambling products but the sports book wants to control how and where the players lose their money and direct them to the products where they have the highest profit margin. This is an understandable business strategy but it’s not exactly honest when they say the changes are for the benefit of the player.

If the situation were reversed and the sports book’s customers were the sharks gobbling up the fish and then turning around and donking off their poker winnings in the sports book, there isn’t a single sports book that would be complaining about how unfair the game is. Not one.

I mean, you never hear sports books and/or online casinos lowering their sports or casino edges to help keep their customers gambling longer, do you? Do they handicap sports bets to make them more fair for customers who are bad at sports betting? Are there any casinos that will lower the house edge in their games in order to keep players gambling?

The problem with poker and sports books and casinos is that they’re two entirely different types of business. Yes, they’re all considered gambling, but games you play against the house and games like poker where you wager against other players are like night and day when it comes to how the room makes money.

Unfortunately, sports book operators think like sports book operators and casino operators think like casino operators. Neither thinks like a poker room operator.

That’s why I proposed that sports books and casinos should just get out of the poker room business unless they’re going to run their poker room like a poker room.

You can’t run a poker room with the same mentality that you run your sports book. It doesn’t work. Eventually the entire poker ecosystem will collapse under the weight of the sports book’s heavy handed attempts to make poker players act in a manner more agreeable to the sports book.

A lot of this tinkering the sports books want to do is based off the entirely false assumption that they are entitled to the player’s action. By that I mean that if ABC Sports Book sends a player to ABC’s skin on XYZ Poker Network, ABC falsely assumes they own the poker action. They view every dollar lost at the poker tables as a dollar lost from the sports book.

But if ABC didn’t offer poker there’s no guarantee that the money would have found its way to ABC. Let’s say that I have $200 to wager with every month. I put $100 on ABC and bet sports and I take the other $100 and put it on my favorite poker room and play poker.

Now ABC starts offering poker and my full $200 goes onto ABC. ABC is assuming that the $100 I spend on poker is money they are entitled to win from me in the sports book. They don’t understand that they gained whatever action they’re getting on my poker play as a bonus. That was money that was going elsewhere before.

But when you hear the sports books and even the poker networks talk about it, they speak in terms of owning the action. For instance, they say stuff like, “Our players are losing money to the sharks,” but the players don’t belong to the sports book. If the sports book didn’t offer poker the player would be playing on a different site losing that money. All they did was provide an incentive (convenience) for betting sports and playing poker under the same roof.

Or, what if I start off betting $200 a month on sports at ABC and really get into this poker thing. If I start spending $100 a month at their poker tables ABC views whatever money I lose to other players as money out the window for them. But in reality, if they didn’t offer poker I would have cut back my sports wagering by $100 anyway and been giving my poker business to someone else.

That’s why they’re trying to make poker behave more like games against the house. When they say that they want to handicap the game or even the playing field, what they’re really saying is that they want to figure out a way to make the players churn the money and generate more rake rather than losing it to players who are not going to give it back to them in the sports book or casino.

The big challenge for sports books and casinos is coming to grips with the fact that they need to treat their poker offering as a completely separate and independent entity. They have to quit thinking about them owning the customers and all of their action, and think about it as if they were building up a stand-alone poker business.

I mean, you don’t see Caesars Entertainment going around at the WSOP trying to get people over to the casino games, do you? Of course not. Caesars treats poker as a completely separate business unit. They realize that there’s money to be made building the WSOP brand. And while it may cannibalize some of their other gaming, it is also bringing in business they would have never had access to without poker.

On the other hand, you don’t see too many sports books known for their poker room offering. Nobody seems to be running their poker operations like they’re trying to be a market leader in poker.

Online sports books and casinos need to come to terms with the fact that as the popularity of poker increases that many of their players will divert some of their gambling money to poker. They can either accept that and try to offer the best poker playing experience for their players and keep some of that action (via the rake) or they should just abandon poker altogether.

It’s playing that middle that’s hurting the game. Forcing players to gamble on their terms rather than how players want to play has consequences. You can only force so much onto the players before the freedom, selection, and quality of games on other sites outweighs the convenience of doing all of their betting under one roof. And since that’s really the only thing holding most of these sports book poker rooms together, it could be a fatal mistake for them.