Death Race 2011

That is, death to the race table 2011.

I'd like to rewind back about ten years. At this point I had already learned enough about the nature of Internet poker free money games to understand that something wasn't quite right. In fact, "quite right" is an understatement. Having seen how much fun it was to bust the Omaha Hi-Lo games on PS it was were I gravitated to when I attacked Absolute. You could always find a $100/$200 no limit blinds table that was full with a waiting list and a bunch of other $100/$200 tables that were close to full.

This is at a point in time when apparently millions of poker players thought the "race table" concept was the most fun one could have since poking your brother's eye out with Jarts. No thought. No competitiveness. Simply push all-in every hand. This is where one can sit in on a 20k buy in game and amass more than a million chips in less than hour. Because there's always lots of rich patsies to lose and re-buy in again. And again. And again.

Now, the only no limit games are $0.50/$.25 and $0.25/$0.10 blinds. And when I checked here not a single soul was interested.

With the special attention I've obviously received over the past two years I'd like to think that I've convinced them that it was causing more damage to thier reputation than it was worth to constantly fill up higher blinds tables than whatever benefit they were getting by these games. (The only thing that comes to mind is padding the lobby totals with fake positions to make it look like 200,000 more people were playing than actually were.)

The race table is dead. Rest in peace and rot in hell.

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Two nights ago I played my favorite Matrix game on Full Tilt. Looking at the registration screen I see 6 tables that are within my acceptable limits of how much I am willing to put at risk. With 133k chips I'm not willing to put up $100,000 for a buy in. So, it's either $10k or $2k. As I am deciding, the $2k buy in tables disappear. And as of last night, they haven't come back.

Now, as for the play it' was the best cards I've gotten in ages. In fact, they were way too good to be believable. I won $35k minus my buy in for a $25k pay off. If this was some type of bribe to silence me be forewarned - it doesn't work that way. Bogus cards are bogus cards. Good or bad.

Randy Macho Man Prevents the End of the World

There's this wild conspiracy theory floating around on the Internet that the reason the world didn't end on 5/21 was that Randy "Macho Man" Savage delivered an atomic elbow to a key archangel moments before the Rapture was about to happen. As I am surprisingly not as sacrilegious as you might think, this reeks of bullshit to me.

Randy's real purpose was to hook up with Itty the Kid and mess up any decent poker tables available, i.e. the ones I'd like to play on. Tonight I started with my favorite target PokerStars and they are currently going through another one of those phases where new tables aren't offered and the only games registering are a few non-popular games. Fine by me. Strangely, I didn't want to get cheated for the 6th night in a row. Maybe next week.

So I switch to Absolute. Just for giggles, or maybe Randy's atomic elbow whispering in my unprotected groin I check out the bad beat jackpot. It keeps on clicking away and growing. Strangely, always even multiples of 50 cents. After stressing for 2.18 milliseconds on why the payoff ends in either .37 or .87 I switched to a search of my dear old friend Freckledmom, and for the first time in months I see her playing.

Not surprisingly she starts with a 2,000 on a pot limit Omaha Hi-Lo game and within 4 minutes she's got 15k. Eventually some sense of sanity was restored and the play over the next several minutes she basically broke even - even lost a little.

Bored with this I try to play a game of Elimination Blackjack. Even I am not so bored that I'm going to play a $100 buy in. But the two and three table $1,000 buy in games have no players waiting. This is attributable to Randy's hatred of blackjack, no doubt.

Logging into Full Tilt, the $2,000 Matrix game was taking way too long to fill in. I'm reminded of the story of how Randy, in a steroid induced rage, threw a barbell through his TV because he didn't understand what the point of Matrix 3 was. Trust me. Nobody else does.

So here I am. Time for me and the dog to watch a movie.


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Damage Control -

The religious references and refernces to Randy are not meant to demean religion or Randy. They are a probably sorry attempt to use humor to bust on the continued inconsistencies and stupidity of Internet poker.

Growing up I was entertained by Randy, even though I knew wrestling was scripted. Wrestling may have taken money out of people's pockets, but there was still some entertainment value unlike getting cheated at poker.

The Bad Beat Jackpot

In my journey through what some people call life while others are non-caring AI I've been to a bunch of brick and mortar casinos. There's always a slot jackpot based on how much people dump into the one armed bandits. It keeps growing. The sheeple see the magical pay out that will change their life forever and keep feeding the quarters into the machine mouth.

Absolute has their version. The Bad Beat Jackpot. First of all, you have to be playing at a real money table. It's pretty reasonable to assume that someone isn't going to win 67 thousand dollars real money playing a free money game.

Since I am not a normal person and I check things beyond the play of the rigged cards I took a screenshot of the bad beat jackpot yesterday. And one today.

It went up exactly one dollar. Not 45 cents, not $2.35 and not growing as time and wagers go on. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is pretty much stagnant.

Yep. Play those real money games and dream of the big score. It's not going to happen.

OK, let's break this down. The site that offered us Freckledmom and Fackingchicken, the two most obvious pieces of artificial intelligence I've had the joy to meet up with are now concerned about people getting cheated out of reaL money.

Absolute and UB have exited. By your own volition. You made the warm and fuzzy curled up next to the kitten decision to take the high road and just stop cheating people out of their money.

Absolute AND UB? It's the same database pretending that it is real people. There was no merger of two sites.

If you play for real money......oops real-money, gotts have that hyphen - you deserve to lose your money. If you're so concerned about returning funds to your players break out the checkbook.

I am the Nostradamus of Internet Poker

I GOT A STRAIGHT FLUSH WOO HOO!!!!

And immediately I said to myself. Here's where I get a combination of non-callable hands or great hands that get beaten by killer hands. Versus me PokerStars simply refuses to make it random and realistic. One straight flush on five draw does not make up for getting one Ace in 25 hands of Hold'em (with something stupid like a six or seven paired up with it.

We here at the Big Lay Down are not surprised by the timing of this. This is because the mystical portents of movies watched have been pointing to this the past few days. I took off work on Thursday because the stupid dog did something stupid on Wednesday night and I wanted to pamper him.

Because unlike rigged Internet poker positions I do have things to do other than raise pre-flop on every single hand. The ensuing crappy movie marathon included a movie that really isn't too crappy. I've seen it before, but locked into the sofa I weatched "1408" again. Pretty clever horror movie. But, it got me reflecting on another John Cusack film based on a year. "2012"

Oh My God. The world's going to end tomorrow. And Jarah hasn't rescinded the restraining order yet.

And while I got cheated tonight I had some weird low budget Chinese movie called "Vampire Killers" queued up. Zombies. Oh My God. The Zombie Apocalypse.

This is it. The signs are all pointing to Internet zombies taking over the world. Years of non-random cards have strengthened them to become an unstoppable force. Why did I use my last three shotgun shells on that squirrel last night? I'll have to wade through hundreds of zombies to get to the store to replace them.

And worst off. When I am proven right I'm going to lose my status as a non-prophet organization.

PokerStars Must Still be Stinging from the Lockdown

I can't speak for everyone. I can only speak for outspoken critics like myself. In general PokerStars refuses to present a game that's even modestly reasonable. There must be some free money junk bonds tied up in cattle futures that can be converted into real money to pay off their cash outs. Or something.

It's amazing how I'm able to predict the turn and the river. The best hand only wins 1 thenth of the time, and the rest have everything ranging from a mild bad beat to a colossal huge bad beat by someone that went all in on shady cards.

Then again, there's always my favorite pre-flop screw over hand. The pair of Kings.

Buried deep in this blog, unless it's been deleted for space purposes, is one of my all time favorite incidents. This goes back a decade ago when net poker was much more popular and I was fond of posting in the chat "yfr." Basically clueing them in that I knew it was bogus. I got a pair of pocket kings. I played it normally, and won a modest pot. Next hand, another pair of pocket kings. WARNING WILL ROBINSON, DANGER DANGER! Thanks to the beer I folded it immediately. An ace was turned up on the table and the ks would have lost.

The rookie admin at the time must have been astonished that someone would fold pocket ks without a call and the next hand was another pair of ks. Having a firm grasp of math (and the alphabet, which doesn't help for poker, but it is on my resume) this was also folded immediately and would have lost.

Since things have been so non-random and difficult lately, this pair of kings was also folded immediately. And I can't prove it for sure, but the betting certainly looked like the guy had an ace.

Bored enough with going nowhere I did call a smaller stack all in with AQ. The raiser has JJ. There was a queen on the flop. And two diamonds. I said to myself, "let me guess. One of his jacks is a diamond. Looks like it's time for a diamond on the turn and the river." You betcha.

And as for getting three pairs of pocket kings in a row (and the first card of the next hand was a king!) It's the statistical equivalent of an incandesent light bulb going supernova in the Mesozoic Era and wiping out the dinosaurs. Shit like this doesn't happen in real life.

Internet Poker is not rigged, and I can prove it

I raised on one hand and evryone FOLDED! Good I love this game. And if this keeps up I'll have one million chips free money in something like 5 years. Now, with this 1 million free money chips I could buy into a single table and watch while my 5 year chip stack is ruined on one bad beat, or I could play another 5 years and build myself up to the point where I'm comfortable to log in to 1 million buy in table and when the inevitable fuck over comes I still have a million chips.

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You have to be kidding. Nine players with a million chips log in to a table. And the play looks like they don't even care if they lose.

Because a server feeding AI and admins has an infinitical ( real word) supply of chips that the ordinary dudish (real word) guy can't compete with.

Amongest (real word) all the race tables I've sat at I have never seended (real word) this many chips. Npw, these are allegedly real people that haven't had the chance to take abathroom break or eat some food or masturbulate (real word). They live, drink, breathe, osmotically (real word) live for internet poker.

As I've often said - if the free money games are a stinkiful (real word) all in bogusity (real word) why the hell would I evr break out the checkbook and play for real money?

Playing to Win (or not)

One of the constant curiosities relative to Internet poker is the abundance of positions not playing seriously. Sometimes it's easy to spot. The "player" that raises pre-flop every single hand. The "player" that doesn't seem to know that it's Razz instead of normal 7 card stud. The "player" goes all in on the first hand on a full table with cards that aren't even worth a call. The standard excuse for that last one is that it was a bluff. And it's a stupid bluff because you're risking the outcome of the entire tournament to steal $30 of blinds.

But this post isn't about that. It's about deep into a game when the pay off is on the line. And as I've been presented in two consecutive tourneys with the play being fairly obvious to make me lose instead of playing to win I've arrived at this point of my very real and non-artificial intelligence point of my life.

One table game. 6 players. Top two spots get paid off. 3 spots left. And Jays folds virtually every hand. Which basically means that it's a two player game. Except that the other guy than me is an obvious vacuum. Folded 1 hand pre-flop during the 100+ hands I played. Raised a lot. Using my 160+ IQ I in turn folded almost every hand since I had more chips. This paid off.

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Even stranger was last night's two table game where I got into a dogfight with 5 positions left fighting for 4 payoff positions. As it had been running and I had real life stuff to do, (taking care of the dog and eating) I was starting to lose interest, so when that huge bad beat hit me I just turned off the PC with the smallest stack of the 5. Somehow, while not playing I managed to take third as proven by my chip count when I logged in tonight.

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Again - this explains the reason for all the sitting out on PokerStars. Since the cards are not random you can do better by not playing.

"Real Money"

Let's examine Full Tilt's reaction to the lockdown. Nobody can play for "real money"

This is the lamest PR campaign I've seen. And that includes Scientology.

"Real Money" as opposed to the not so fun "Fun money" tables.

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The Sue Wiseman incident

Part of it is experiencing this kind of thing so often, yet part is still common sense and logic that even a newb would find suspicious.

Imagine a meaningless 300 buy in play money 5 card draw game. Imagine the script that one player is playing too slow for the tastes of another. Imagine the annoyed player is called sue wiseman (because that was the name attached to the avatar.) Imagine that I don't get a single decent hand for the first two deals around the table. Imagine I am finally dealt 3 kings. Imagine that I make my first modest, minimum pre-flop raise.

Sue's reaction. Take a lot of time. Call. Draws three. I bet, and Sue raises. Why am I not surprised that she's got three aces?

Because it's rigged. And I've seen it so often I'm immune to being annoyed by it.

After the US lockdown I thought that PokerStars would ease up on the cheating, but it seems to have invigorated them. Trying to silence me by making me lose is not going to work.

Visitors to this blog have been generally silent in the comments to my posts. But, in the last few weeks I've had more traffic than I've ever had since it started. I don't know if these are operators of the poker sites, fans that have experienced some of what I have, casual players looking for poker related reading material or accidental visitors based on Googling some of my topics in the title (e.g. Googling Charlie Sheen Internet Poker at one time had me as the number 2 pick. And that was a really funny post.)

My dog is part pit bull, and it has worn off on me. Both personality and the shed fur that has taken control of the house and my clothes. You have wrecked two jet planes loaded with fuel into my buildings and really, really pissed me off. If you can't do the honorable admission of defeat I will continue to collect the damning screenshots.

And pictures of Asian hotties just for the hell of it.

The Ever Popular Fixed Limit Game

I apologize for not addressing this recently. I've been busy with the other weird stuff.

In my estimate about 5% of the fixed limit games I've played on have been fairly realistic. The collective unconsciousness appears to have the mentality that if I can't go all in that I at least I must raise every chance I get so that the pot will be bigger when I win it. The brutally obvious flaw is that, well, you have to actually win the hand to be rewarded for your betting.

Mr. or Ms. or piece of bellybutton lint ismile got into a mode where the raising was not working so well that he, she, it just kept doing it.

I think PokerStars has a trade free money chips option. You could save everyone a lot of trouble by just logging in, giving up your (cough cough) hard earned chips and then pounding a bottle of Jager, pass out, barely wake up to function for your minimum wage janitor job, cash your paycheck, blow it all at the strip club (hey - it's your mentality - sorry I have a real life instead of feeding my opponents on a strategy game) and then considering putting a bullet in my skull because I'm such a jackass.