From the ridiculous to the downright nefarious.

On NLOP you get points for free, just for logging in, taking a lame survey and answering a bogus question. The lame survey is usually something ultra-lame like what you know about current pop music, who won the WSOP in 2004, what electronics you own, etc....

The past two nights its been very personal financial and demographics info. How old are you? How much money do you make a year? Do you own a house? Do you have a retirement plan?

Do you have bad poker skills and can I cheat you out of money?

I've already been flagged as someone that won't put real money on this crap. Today they thought they won with EXTREME pauses. The lame excuse was that the server was down, and all the players had a problem gettting connected. Not me. I was connected and multi-tasking watching a movie. And since I already figured out the scam, more than willing to fold instead of playing real poker.

The extreme pauses started a couple of nights ago. Being observant I noticed that it was game admin pause to set the next hands - usually give player good cards, watch him go all in and lose. This week it has been watch the real player get bored and call on marginal hands. Then make the rest of the game play out from there, which includes me folding hands that should have been called.

There still courting players in the Free Trial Period. They know that the AI isn't good enough to rope them in. Playing against a real human is much more exciting. So, I'm being used to play for real, which I don't because I play bad poker to win. And they're using me to test out the newest versions of the AI. So I still occassionally have some success. Keep me logged on to play and see what is going on.

I loved NLOP for the first three weeks or so. I finished in the top three and got points 3 out of every four games. Playing real poker. But now the free trial period is over and I'm stuck folding like crazy just to have a chance. Forget about calling any of the first three hands. Learm to play short stacked.

And them ther's the possibiliy of hacking to worry about. Which may also be the reason for the extreme pauses. I am so sick of running my registry editor to clean up my pc that almost always seems to pop up from playing poker. And the worst attack I ever suffered came from playing a lot on Pokerfrauds.com. My PC was so messed up it took me two days to fix it. These sites are outside the US. They have no laws that stop you from screwing with someone else's computer.