May 7, 2008
Legalization
I've been thinking about the future of online poker a decent amount lately. There's a pretty big push for making it legal, and there's even a bill in the house that would work toward that. I don't know if it will pass or not, but the poker sites finally have the lobbying arm they should have years ago. I even suggested that to Party Poker on one of their cruises long, long ago and Vikrant Barghava said they didn't need to because the US would "just ignore online poker forever." Their share price tells me he was wrong.
Between the PPA, the World Trade Organization, where the Europeans may soon follow Antigua's lead in claiming that our policies are unfair and a violation of the treaty (which has been deemed true), and the lack of banking regulations which were called for by the UIGEA and should have been in place months ago, it seems like there's a good chance that it will become regulated.
So what will it mean for poker if it does? Quite a bit actually.
It's sort of an axiom in the startup world that every hoop you make a user jump through in order to use your site reduces the amount of people who actually do so by some percentage. This should be pretty obvious. The exact percentage depends on the hurdle. Sites like Digg have millions of readers, tens of thousands of commenters, and thousands of submitters, because each step requires more effort than the previous (with just signing up an account being the largest). I vaguely remember reading that in the early days of PayPal they discovered that each new step they introduced caused 30% of people to give up. That's enormous. To put that another way, eliminating one step would grow their signup rate by nearly 50%.
Online poker, almost since its inception, has been besieged with hurdles preventing a new player from playing. To play at a site you have to do the following things:
- Go to the website and download the software. (There are web based versions, but not many, and they suck.)
- Install.
- Create your account. Input user name, password, email address.
- Verify your email address.
- Input all necessary information for a real money account. Address, phone number, etc., some of which may have to be verified by a phone call or a code in the mail.
- Input checking account and routing number.
- Wait a few days for the site to EFT a small deposit into your account.
- Check your bank statement to see what the deposits were.
- Input them into the poker site.
- Fund poker account.
- Wait a few days for the e-check to clear.
And that's all assuming you knew right away that they wouldn't accept your credit card. Step number 6 for most people is to try the credit card functionality in the cashier and get rejected.
It's been that way for a very long time. Back in 2000, when I first started playing online, the high chargeback rate had already caused almost every credit card issuer to stop accepting online gaming transactions. There's been a cat and mouse game over that for the last 8 years, with payment processors tricking the banks, who found out and cut them off, at which point they closed down and opened a new corporation and did it again. It goes on and on, but the banks have always had the upper hand and 95% of the time your credit card was getting rejected.
Also, that was just the procedure for one site. Most people added an extra step in and went with Neteller so they could then play at any site. Back when I started playing PayPal was the method of choice, but that changed around the time of the eBay acquisition.
There's also the legal hurdle. A lot of people think playing online poker is illegal, even though in most states it is not. I've met a number of people who were deterred by that. That should almost be a step in the above chain.
So if the UIGEA becomes legal, and steps 6-11 (plus the two pseudo-steps) get replaced by one credit card or PayPal transaction, I think we're going to see an order of magnitude more players than ever before.
Over my next few posts, I'm going to examine how I think this will affect the poker economy. I'll talk about the following groups:
- Sites (current and future)
- Players
- Ancillary Services Providers (like myself)
- Live poker and events
Stay tuned.
Posted by themaroon at 12:42 AM | Comments ()
April 1, 2008
Poker PC
Someone not too long ago asked me what I thought they should look for in a computer for playing poker online. It got me thinking. I realized I've learned quite a bit about that over the last 6 years or so, and that the information might help a lot of you, so here are my thoughts. I'm going to go more in-depth here and talk about the entire office, because there are other things just as important as the pc.
If you're a good player and playing for a living (or for a serious percentage thereof) a good home office isn't a luxury, it's an investment. And if you're good at poker, budget isn't really a concern for you. So I'm going to just assume that price is no real object, but that you're also not looking to spend just for the sake of spending.
First I should start with the setup. Buy the best office chair you can. I bought an Aeron, and it's the most comfortable chair in my house. Unless you count the ones in my car (and if anyone can tell me how to make a Lexus seat into an office chair, I'm all ears) it's probably the most comfortable I've ever sat in. I used to play in a very nice leather recliner, then in a reclining couch, but switching to an Aeron was the best thing I ever did. The reclining tended to make me tired, and caused back pains after very long stretches.
Aerons are the gold standard when it comes to office chairs, and they charge for it. It will run you about $1k new. You can find them on Craigslist used for half that, though if you go that route, be sure to go to a store first and find the right size for you. They aren't one size fits all like the crap you buy at Staples, so make sure you get the right one.
Even used that's a pretty damn expensive chair, but consider that even a mediocre $5/$10 player makes that back in 20 hours (on average of course) and that you're going to be sitting in the thing a hell of a lot. It will save you so many aches and pains that you'll probably work more just for owning it, so it will pay for itself many times over. And it will last forever. I've had mine for about 3 years, and have driven it across the country twice, and it's still almost as good as new.
As for a desk, who really cares? Get something made of sturdy wood since it will be holding a decent amount of weight in monitors (I'll get into that in a minute). IKEA sells passable ones for $50. There's a saying in the startup world that applies to any home office: "Always buy the cheapest tables and the most expensive chairs."
I recommend some stand lamps for your room if it's not very well-lit already. You'll reduce eyestrain by keeping your monitor's brightness down and the rest of the room's brightness up. I did this by replacing the bulbs in my ceiling fixture with compact fluorescents. Since your fixtures can only support a limited wattage (75-100 being typical) CFLs give you much more light (a 40w CFL is equivalent to a 150w incandescent) and save you money since they're going to be on a lot.
Get a good wired mouse. I'd search Amazon for a gaming mouse and buy whatever is highest rated. There's nothing worse than having a battery die on you while you're playing 4 tables, and if you have a wireless mouse, this will happen to you at some point. Keyboards don't really matter, you can play just fine if it runs out of juice. I'm rather partial to my Logitech DiNovo Edge (especially since it has a backup mouse) but that's neither here nor there.
Get redundant internet connections. I like to keep my cable company's highest speed internet as my primary line. If you have telephone service you can probably get their cheapest DSL as a backup for something $10-$15 a month. If, like me, you don't have a landline, get an EVDO USB adapter from Verizon or Sprint, or set your PC up to use your phone's tethering (much cheaper, and very good quality if you have a Motorola Q). If you're playing bigger stakes this only has to save you from timing out once every few months to pay for itself. It will. You don't realize how much your internet goes down until you work a job where it costs you hundreds (or more) every time it does.
If you go with cable and DSL you obviously will have two networks. If you can, have your primary one wired as it will save you some headache. Remember that with technology, each step in the chain is just one more place for something to fail, and wireless routers/cards are somewhat unreliable. If wired isn't an option, just get two wireless routers. It doesn't really matter which, the cheapo Linksys WRT54G that's in damn near every home in America will suffice. Password protect your internet using WPA, like you would any home network.
Get as many uninterrupted power supply (UPS) systems as you need. These are basically like surge protectors with a built-in battery. When a power outage occurs they'll keep things running. Be sure to plug your cable/DSL modems, switches, routers, etc. into the battery protected ports. Also plug in your PC and monitors. I once played a tournament for 3 hours (on a laptop) during a blackout. The UPSes will pay for themselves the first time the power goes out while you're playing. If you're using the setup I'm about to recommend you might only have 15 minutes or so, but that's enough to play until the blinds and then close all of your tables without a disconnect.
Note that all of the redundancy I recommend to avoid disconnects is less important if you play limit games, where you are typically just put all-in. If you play no-limit (which often has a no-disconnect protection policy) it's extremely important, as a power outage could cost you a lot of money. In fact, you theoretically gain a little edge over people who don't have that.
So we've got a great chair, a cheap table, lighting, and enough redundant internet and power that it's pretty much going to take a hurricane to force us to disconnect. And other than the chair, we've only spent a couple hundred bucks. Now let's blow some real cash.
First the PC. You're using PokerTracker/Poker Ace, so that means Windows. (I don't know if you can run PT with Postgres and PA using Parallels on a Mac, but I'd guess it would be a nightmare at best.) What version of Windows doesn't really matter, but you're probably going to be using Vista, so I'd recommend either Home Premium or Ultimate. Not for any poker related reasons, just in general.
I'm going to recommend a desktop as well, because PT/PA can be resource hogs, and we're going to want a workhorse and a couple big monitors to match. As far as desktop OEMs go, I like HP. Their products usually hold up better than Dell's, cost about the same, and have better service. You could buy any brand of computer though, so feel free to shop around. What you are looking for is:
Core 2 Quad processor. I've heard the new version of PT is threaded. Either way, like I said, PT/PA hog a surprising amount of resources, so horsepower is important.
4GB RAM minimum. More is better (though price increases exponentially after this) but don't go under 4, especially on Vista.
Discrete graphics card with 2 DVI/VGA ports. Don't get anything integrated, because we're connecting 2 monitors at high resolution and trust me, you don't want to go there with some turd Intel video chip that shares memory. You don't need a high-end gamer card at all because frame rates aren't a concern, so just get the cheapest one with 512mb and you'll be fine. I'm guessing most cards with 256mb would do as well, but I don't know for sure and the price difference is generally only $40.
Fastest hard drive possible. You don't really care about storage much, as poker hands don't take up much room in the old DB. But I've run PT/PA on a 5,400 rpm drive and it was brutal. Don't settle for less than 7,200 rpm, and if you can find one with a 10k rpm drive (and short of a very expensive gamer PC I don't know that you can) you're golden.
Best of all may be to get a computer with a RAID 1 (also referred to as mirrored) array. These are commonly available even in lower-end PCs now. I don't know how much performance increase you'll get from the increased read speed, but it's probably something, and it definitely won't slow you down. And you have protection from hard drive failure.
Either way, also get an external HD (or maybe one of those personal media drive thingies if you buy an HP) and buy Norton Ghost to backup your pc onto it. You should do this with any computer that has stuff on it you care about, and you definitely do not want to lose years of PT data. Hard drives fail. Trust me. I learned the hard way. And though a RAID helps guard against hard drive failure, that isn't the only way to lose data.
Get a built in 802.11b/g card. Most of the rest of the PC-related stuff doesn't matter. Sound cards, speakers, DVD drives, etc. Whatever you want there.
Now for monitors. I recommend 2 24" LCDs. HP's monitors are generally awesome. Do not buy Dells. I don't know about their current generation of monitors, but the old ones had awful brightness controls and won't let you turn it down far enough. HP does a pretty good job there. I bought 2 of their 23" models 3 or 4 years ago and still love them.
The reason I like ones so big is that they have resolution of 1,920x1,200. A poker table is natively 800x600, meaning you can run 4 on one screen with no overlap. The second monitor allows you to play another 4 if you wish (though I generally don't recommend that many tables). I usually use it for PT/PA and AIM, Rhapsody, Outlook, whatever.
True, you could get smaller screens and resize now that most good poker rooms finally have caught up to the same technology every other program had in 1991. But if anything, I'd like my tables to be bigger. I'm all about preserving my vision.
I priced the PC and 2 monitors at about $2,300 on HP.com. Toss in the chair, etc, and you're looking at $3,000-$3,500 (depending on if you buy the chair new or used). It's not a cheap setup, but it will pay for itself many times over.
Anything I left out?
Posted by themaroon at 10:48 PM | Comments ()
March 19, 2008
Rakeback Update
I've gone ahead and paid rakeback for last month. Most of you probably already noticed it, but for those who didn't, it got there a couple days ago. I pretty much realized that there is no way Full Tilt is going to make things right with me. And legal action doesn't really seem sensible. So, I decided my best course of action was to just accept the payment and pay my people out, minimizing the disruption to the customers they haven't stolen, which I did.
That said, I'm going to put a little effort into signing up anyone else who takes Americans. I'm really interested in hearing what sites you guys would like to play at. Does anyone trust Absolute Poker anymore? What about Ultimate Bet? Cake Poker appears to be popular amongst other rakeback sites, does anyone play there?
Back to working on Part 3 of my series.
Posted by themaroon at 12:27 AM | Comments ()
March 11, 2008
Full Tilt Sucks
I'm posting this here because I know most of my rakeback clients read this blog and I want you guys to know what's going on. Rakeback this month will be delayed, and I don't know how long it will take to pay out. As per Full Tilt's Affiliate Agreement (which I've posted here so that there will be a permanent copy of it as of the time of this writing) any time I have a problem with Full Tilt's payments, I must not accept them until it is resolved. That's what is going on, and as soon as the problem is fixed I will accept the payments and pay out on the same day.
When I first started running rakeback on Full Tilt, I referred to them a player who had been with me on my program for quite a while. He played a lot, and did well in poker generally, and recently became a Full Tilt Pro. I won't say who he is or what his deal with them is, as it's not my place to do so, but it involves Full Tilt paying him a portion of his rake.
As such Full Tilt apparently decided they don't owe me any of his rake anymore. That is wrong on so many levels. Most importantly, we have a binding agreement that they will pay me x% of his rake. That agreement does not say "we will pay you x% of the player's rake, unless he plays a lot and wins some tournaments, in which case we'll promote him to pro and pay you 0%." Had that been the case, I would have decided to work with a more reputable poker room from the start. Essentially they're punishing me for referring them a high quality player.
Also, the player remained on my reports all month. Full Tilt's affiliate site has been broken sporadically (no big shocker, their programming is all-around pretty shoddy) but not until after the month ended was he removed. So they apparently decided only recently to remove him from my tracker, and never bothered to tell me that they were taking my biggest customer away, even though they'd been showing me his rake all month long. Perhaps they thought I wouldn't notice?
And lastly, it puts me in a tough position with my current rakeback customers. Full Tilt's affiliate support isn’t any better than their normal support, so getting any sort of response from them takes days. I don't know why they choose to run their site so poorly, but you'd think they'd at least respond to people like me, whose efforts make them hundreds of thousands, or even millions, per year. But I have to wait the same week for any response that anyone else does. And yet I have to wait to deal with them, because otherwise I'm going to be forced to pursue arbitration, and accepting this payment would make that impossible.
So I won't be ending Full Tilt rakeback, and I hope to get this resolved ASAP. I suspect we'll get this worked out one way or another, and all will continue as planned. But I'll probably be looking for other sites to focus my promoting on in the future. Where is everybody playing these days?
Posted by themaroon at 8:13 PM | Comments ()
March 3, 2008
Rotating
Last night after dinner, the four of us decided it would be fun to play a rotation game. I generally prefer to play those these days, as it makes the game more interesting and I think the draw triple-draw games have a lot more depth to them than hold'em.
I remember when I first learned of their existence and started playing a bit. It was a couple years into my stint as a professional poker player. Up until that point, the only non-hold'em games spread at reasonable stakes were O8 or Stud 8, and I never cared too much for either. (I've since come to at least like Stud 8, if not love it, but O8 still puts me to sleep.) Eventually as poker gained in popularity the long tail effect took hold and you started seeing crazy stuff like Chinese Poker, Badugi, and Triple Draw join mixes. Staid old HORSE tables were replaced with wilder rotations.
I asked Daniel Negreanu for some pointers on 2-7 while we were both on break from a limit hold'em tournament at Bellagio (the one David Williams one, which I know I talked about here long ago) and he told me to read his section in Super System 2 once it came out, and that after I did so I'd be better than almost everyone. A few months later the book was released and I read up, then started playing those games whenever possible, mostly with friends. What Daniel had said proved to be true, the section was brief, to the point, and maybe not flawless (I don't know enough to say for sure) but definitely very accurate. I found myself quickly killing the few TD games I could find.
The problem, of course, is that there is more than one copy of that book in print, and it didn't take long for everyone else to read it as well. No longer could you just sit in a $30/$60 game on Ultimate Bet full of donkeys, because they all paid for their $15 lesson too. And that's when the game really got fun.
All forms of poker have one thing in common, which is that at the lowest levels, it's all about executing a fairly simple plan. It doesn't take a smart person very long to learn to beat a $3/$6 hold'em table if they work at it a bit. It quickly becomes boring and mechanical, but it is also relatively profitable. In fact, you'll never make a higher big bet per hour rate than you will at those kinds of games.
In 2-7, the edge over a sucker seems to be even bigger than in hold'em because the game is, on many levels, more involved. So you can really tear people up if they don't understand the fundamental principles, which are a little different and more complex, and therefore harder to figure out on your own. You see new players calling a raise and drawing 3 all the time, or limping in early and drawing to what you later find out was something like 78. Those people are simply confused by the amount of options and have no chance in hell. It's easier for a novice hold'em player to get lucky and win against skilled competition than a triple draw one.
But when you move up to limits where everyone has a good fundamental understanding, at any variant, it becomes a whole new game. And that's where 2-7 really shines. The game is much more creative than others because you have less concrete information, but more abstract. Unlike hold'em, in which you see 5 of your opponents' 7 cards, a 2-7 player might have 10 or more cards pass through his hand and you never see any of them. In hold'em, the only abstract information is your opponent's betting pattern. In 2-7, you have both that and their draws.
In 2-7, a player can stand with a hand that they should draw to in order to represent a made hand. This becomes even more relevant in a game like Badugi where it is hard to even hit a made hand, and is why I think that that is, in fact, the ultimate poker game. Thus there's nothing in poker more fun than playing rotation games, as far as I'm concerned.
So back to last night. We decided to play a little low stakes rotation, and we ended up doing a little $4/$8 at the Wynn. We ended up playing Badugi, Omaha High, Triple Draw, Hold'em, Stud Eight, Razz, which we called BATHER. Apparently since O usually represents O8, Omaha High is often denoted with an A.
I got into an interesting conversation with a floor guy, who clearly didn't understand my point. Regulations here apparently state that games cannot be spread privately, they must be open to all to join. That's why Andy Beal and his opponents started playing at such ridiculous stakes. He wanted to play heads up, and the only way to ensure that was to play so high that nobody could afford to just horn in on the game.
But, at the same time, the house is required to set a limit on the number of players at one table. This is obvious, as the rules of hold'em would only even allow 22 players to play (44 hole cards, 5 board, 3 burn). Hold'em tables in casinos never accommodate more than 10 though, due to size limitations and the fact that no sane person would play at a 22 man table. So clearly a casino is allowed to set a limit as to how many players can play at a table. They have to.
So my question was "could a casino spread a heads up table?" The table wouldn't be private per se. It would have a list just like any other, and when one player got up, the next on the list could join. The only difference is that unlike normal tables, which typically have a maximum player limit between eight and ten, this one would have a maximum player limit of two.
The floor man clearly didn't understand what I was getting at. I tried rephrasing it as "is there a law that sets the lowest maximum number of players at a table?" but as soon as the words left my mouth I knew they were pointless. I am curious about the answer though. The reason I asked is that mixed games are normally spread 8 handed, but with 2-7 triple draw only 6 players play at a time, which means that two players have to sit out each hand. That's incredibly annoying for me, since I just want to have fun and play draw games. Our table was an unadvertised one spread just for us, but there was a list for a $4/$8 rotation game before we even got there, and since we were already at 6 (two passers-by joined very quickly) we didn’t want any more players to sit down.
My guess is that the casino could technically do that, but they're far more concerned about pissing off regulators than they are pleasing the people who want to play heads up so they won't. Whatever they could rake from heads up games isn't going to move their bottom line enough to risk it.
Today I went over to Bellagio to see if they had any rotation games going. They used to have a great $40/$80 one that featured TD, Stud Hi-Lo Regular (no 8 or better qualifier), Omaha 8, and sometimes Badugi. The floor person told me that all they had was $100/$200 HORSE, but that someone else had just asked about the same game and maybe if we both wanted she could start it. I asked who, and she pointed to my left. It turned out to be Greg Raymer, who was standing right beside me. I figured that he probably wasn't the mark I was looking for, and that I'd be better off trying again tomorrow.
Posted by themaroon at 5:07 AM | Comments ()
March 1, 2008
Poker People
I'm out in Las Vegas hanging out with Richard and company (if you're here hit me up and we'll grab a drink) and I must say, it's made me a little reminiscent about the past five years. I miss the poker lifestyle. I don't miss the game that much (though I do a little at times) but I miss the travelling, the food, the company.
I've been spending the past few months out in Silicon Valley dealing with raising an investment round, and it has made me appreciate the honesty and directness you find among poker players. Not all, to be sure. The average poker player is probably a scumbag. But the good ones have an honor code that's simple, direct, and unwavering. That's one of those things that you don't fully appreciate until it's gone.
We're trying to do an angel round and put together a number of individual investors, to avoid the hassles of institutional ones, which means talking to a lot of different people. (If you're interested, feel free to email me for details.) Our experiences with them so far have pretty much ranged from excellent to atrocious. But even at their best, it's not like dealing with poker players, who will often make far larger agreements (in the form of stakes, etc.) in 15 minutes over just a handshake.
Of course you wouldn’t expect or want anyone to invest in a company with nothing but a handshake. But you would expect people to be direct when dealing with you. You don't expect the guy who told you three times that he just invests his own money and wants to be part of your funding round to say a couple weeks later "I'm not sure if we're going to do this, let me talk to my partners." (Partners meaning they invest other people's money too.)
People who invest in early stage companies, use all sorts of strategies to stall for time, even when they're interested, since if a company is 6 months old, stalling for 3 months gives you 50% more data on which to act. Or maybe they decide they don't want to invest, but they don't want to tell you no in case your site takes off a month or two later, so they string you along.
It's the industry equivalent of angle shooting. Luckily Paul Graham explained pretty much every tactic in his writing over the years so none of it is a surprise, though I wouldn’t have expected people to keep using the same tricks after they were so clearly defined, especially on someone they know has spent the last six months listening to the person who exposed them.
I have no problem with people who don't want to invest in my company for whatever reason. Maybe they don't like fantasy sports in general, or they don't feel they know enough to make an educated decision, or maybe they don’t like the gaming nature of our site and worry about the legal ramifications. Or hell, maybe they don't like me. I don't know how that could be, but I've heard (mostly in comments here) that some folks don't.
All of that is fine and good. I figure that when it comes to raising money, if you aren't getting passed on, you aren't talking to enough people. Everyone has their own investment criteria, so even the deals that look like the next Google to one investor look like the next Govworks to another. If you haven't found some of both in relation to your deal, you haven't explored your options sufficiently.
So I can handle getting passed on, because if I don’t, I'm not doing my job well. But I despise the angle shooters. I've pretty much just refused to deal with those people, which might limit my options, but is probably best for the company anyway, because the best investors, the ones you really want on your team, are straight shooters. Just like in poker. As one partner from Sequoia (one of the good firms) told me "you can divorce your wife but you can't get rid of your investors." If someone isn't acting admirably in the beginning you can't expect them to start after they write the check, and then you're in serious trouble, because while you can't get rid of them, they can often get rid of you.
In poker I've done a little bit of staking. (I've never done much on the other end, as I always liked to play on my own dime, but I know a lot of people who have.) I've also done a good deal of splitting, which is pretty comparable, and I've known a lot of others who have. And I've had a couple times where someone has owed me a fairly large chunk (or I've owed them) due to a big win, and there's never been a question of if or when the money was going to arrive.
In fact, a player I had only met a few days earlier once gave me $10k in cash to buy into the WSOP because I was passing through Vegas on vacation and wanted to register. I barely knew him, but we had a mutual friend, so he trusted me to transfer him the money on PokerStars, which I did 20 minutes later.
I could tell you tons of stories about someone staking someone they knew by reputation only, but not one where they ended up getting stiffed when the stakee went on to win. I'm sure it's happened, but among the good poker players, the ones any selective human being would befriend, it's virtually unheard of.
I don't know why poker players have such an unusually strong honor code. I think maybe the bluffing element satisfies that natural human predilection for dishonesty. Maybe people lie, cheat, steal, and angle shoot because they feel the rules society imposes on them are too confining, but those who spend all of their time playing a game where one is encouraged to do everything in their power to outsmart their rivals feel no need to circumvent them. Or maybe it's the other way around, and at some level being an honest person makes you more inclined to play poker, and/or makes you better at it if you do.
So maybe it's a correlation. Maybe it's causation. Or maybe I've just been lucky in that the many friends I've made through poker just happen to be a relatively unusual subset of the general population, though I doubt that given the sheer number. But whatever it is, I miss it.
Which is not to say I haven’t met a lot of great people through the startup world. I have, though almost all of them are on my side of the coin. And it's given me perspective, especially realizing that the most successful investors out here, like Sequoias or Baselines, operate more like poker players and less like average VC firms. I'm pretty sure a sufficiently bankrolled poker player could make a killing at tech investing. Maybe it's something I'll try my hand at one day in the distant future.
Posted by themaroon at 6:04 PM | Comments ()
January 6, 2008
Why I Quit Playing Poker For A Living, Pt. 2
There is, that I know of, only one way to deal with the emotional roller coaster that is professional poker, and that is to love the game. In the beginning, I did. I had as close to a natural aptitude for poker as it is possible for one to have. I was an extremely mathematical, logical, emotionally stable young man. Like most in my situation, I was pretty optimistic.
Poker was less like a class and more like a standardized test, challenging you to solve an intricate puzzle quickly. I'd never taken one of those and not ranked in the top percentile, and poker was much the same. I read a couple books, got lucky and won big over my first couple weekends at the Vegas Nights, and by the time the cards caught up to me and I lost the profit back, I'd figured out all I needed to win consistently.
I was quickly broke, though technically still well in the black since I'd spent much of the money. Ironically enough the biggest expenditure was two new tires to replace the ones that were damaged when I parked on an errant nail at the Vegas Nights. I took a little time to reflect, rebuild the bankroll (i.e. wait for a paycheck that didn’t come in shortly after rent was due) and read a couple more books, and when I returned to the tables a couple weeks later it was as if I was an entirely new person.
Something had just clicked. All of a sudden I'd switched from the unsure newbie to a seasoned professional. Low limit Texas Hold'em just made sense. I felt like the poker equivalent of Robert Johnson, who disappeared for a short while and came back such a greatly improved guitarist that legends sprang up of him having sold his soul to the devil.
And maybe in some metaphorical sense that's what I'd done too, as that was without a doubt the most significant turning point in my life. It's when I knew for sure that the straight and narrow wasn’t for me. I still spent a few years struggling with that fact, pressured by friends and family to follow the traditional middle-class white male route through life. Get a degree, become a programmer or a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor, get married, have kids, settle down. Poker made me realize just how boring and unfulfilling that all seemed. And I mean no offense to those who went that route, it just wasn't for me.
When I came back from my hiatus I went on a tear, winning session after session. Each time out I learned a little more and got a little better. For weeks it was one big win after another. I cut through other people's bankrolls like a hot knife through butter, to the point where I'd sit down at a table and four players would leave. One of the guys who ran the game told me, on more than one occasion, to take it easy.
I was, for that short period of time, a juggernaut, a second rake, as inevitable as death and taxes for those who chose to play $3/$6 in Summit County. Of course, that was my first winning streak, the exact opposite of the losing ones I described in part one. It's the best time in a poker player's life. The prolonged period in which every decision makes itself, every two pair holds up and every flush comes in, is the greatest feeling you'll ever get. You feel like you know more about poker than anyone else ever knew, even if you're really just beating plumbers out of their weekend money. And you must because you won every hand.
And that was it for me. From then on, I was to be a professional poker player. It was a couple years before I had the courage and bankroll management skills to make the jump. I even didn't play poker for nearly a year at one point in an attempt to focus on school. But in hindsight, it was inevitable.
After my amazing $3/$6 run settled down, I kept winning (though at a much more reasonable pace) and the game remained fun for a couple years. My two friends, John and Jason, started playing as much as I was, and were winning big (for the stakes) as well. If anything Jason was probably even better than me at those tables because of his totally unflappable demeanor. Low stakes limit hold'em is, more than anything, about executing a fairly simple plan, almost mechanically, and the only real impediment to doing so is the emotional turmoil caused by the variance, which is magnified by a small bankroll. Jason was a really smart guy who rarely if ever tilted and had enough money saved up to deal with the swings, so he was pretty much as close to perfect as humanly possible.
The three of us would split our winnings/losses most of the time. That was good and bad. The good was that it reduced the variance to a manageable level and allowed us to play off of individual bankrolls that were much smaller than we would have needed otherwise without being under too much pressure. I learned how to work with John in very high-stress situations, which has really come in handy now that we're in a startup together. Startups are stressful relative to normal jobs but a joke compared to poker.
And it gave all three of us a group to review hands and bounce ideas off of, which was invaluable. In fact, I wish I had some of our late night dinners on tape. I still remember one night at a shitty little hole in the wall called Peg's (we frequented it since it was near the Barberton Armory, where most of the Nights were held before 9/11, and it was open 24/7) arguing over whether or not one should play King-Jack under the gun. I thought you should limp, John thought you should fold. Now we're both pretty sure we were both wrong. In hindsight, it's hilarious how little we knew.
There were some negative aspects to splitting, one of which was the ethical question. There's been a lot of talk about that over the years, and it still exists in sort of a grey area. It's one of those things that truly depends on the situation, and there is no clear line.
Some of the other Vegas Nighters suspected we were cheating, though we never did. That would have been equivalent to Tiger Woods improving his lie if he went and golfed in a middle-school event. There was just no point. We never once signaled or soft-played (unless we were heads up, in which case we'd often check or fold to avoid the rake, which is common even amongst friends who aren't splitting at lower limits) or trapped others. The games were so action packed that it wouldn't really have been a good idea even if we'd wanted to, though few people there knew enough about the game to understand that. Having a guy with a weaker hand help you jack up a pot against one or two opponents might be a great (though clearly unethical) idea in terms of EV, but when you're up against three people who are happy to cap it anyway, you're just laying odds for no good reason.
I remember once John and I got into a monster pot that had been capped a few ways preflop. He had TT and I had As Ks. The flop was something like Ad Ts 5s and we went to war. Some dumpy fat lady whose name I can't remember (a description that fits about 50% of the people at a Vegas Night) called us the whole way down with AJ, grumbling all the while about how we were trapping her. In the end John rolled over his set and I showed the flush I caught after raising my top pair/top kicker/four flush. We still laugh about that one nearly a decade later.
So I think that many times, even though we weren't cheating, the fact that people thought we might be worked in our favor, in fact probably more so than if we actually had been. Which raises its own ethical question: Is it morally sound to get an edge from not cheating, and being honest about the fact that you aren't cheating, even if that edge only comes from people thinking you are cheating, and if that edge is also greater than if you actually were? I don't know, but luckily for me none of us were philosophy majors, so we didn’t give it much thought and went on splitting our wins and losses and raking in the money.
We also tried to sit at different tables where possible, since it's obviously better to have a table of you and 10 suckers, rather than you, two people who are as good as you, and 8 suckers. (Though I discovered years later that it isn't anywhere near as much better as you might intuitively think. Really as you replace suckers with sharks, up to a certain limit, what happens is that for the most part the suckers just lose more, and the sharks' EV decreases only a small amount.) Unfortunately, though, in a brick and mortar poker room that has more customers than available seats, you really don't have much control over the arrangements, so we ended up together a lot of the time.
Another tough part was the accountability. If John decided to straddle or blind raise or do something else goofy just for fun, it would make me mad because it was my money. I wasn't there to have fun, I was there to make money. Any fun had was just a fringe benefit as far as I was concerned. If one person went on tilt, it cost the other two, causing you to wonder if you should say something, and maybe making you play badly too as you watched your money fly out the window. (On the other hand, though, if you were having a bad day and your partners were killing, it probably kept you from tilting. In the end it probably evens out, but the negative side of the equation sticks in your memory much more than the positive.)
In poker there's always a fine line between accepting the fact that everyone tilts or makes bad plays some times (which is true) and being overly accepting of individual instances, which leads to more. Even though you have to recognize your basic humanity, and that you will make mistakes because of it, you also have to be careful to never use that as an excuse. This was perhaps the most valuable life lesson I got from poker, which is that you must always hold yourself accountable and accept responsibility for your mistakes. And that's hard enough, but when splitting, you're accountable to others as well, and them to you.
Overall, I'm very glad we split. They were fun times. And we made a lot of money for people our age. I remember keeping track once for what came out to about 1,000 playing hours, and in the end I had made roughly $17 per hour. (I also kept track of splitting separately and made about $1 per hour off of it, so over that time John and Jason combined made a little more than I did.) That's almost three big bets per hour, or, given the pace of those games, roughly 9 big bets per 100 hands. And that was with a 10% up to $5 rake. Anywhere else results like that would seem to be an anomaly, but at the Vegas nights they were sustainable.
And it was a pretty good chunk of change for a 19 year old to make from his hobby. All of my friends were broke, and I always had a wallet full of hundreds. While my coworkers were trying their damndest to get more scheduled hours, I'd routinely take a few days off of work, unpaid, to head up to Soaring Eagle, an Indian casino in Michigan that only required players to be 18.
Posted by themaroon at 10:01 PM | Comments ()
December 18, 2007
Why I Love The Industry I'm In
Humorous post at FSL's blog. It's always good when your competition writes at a fifth grade level. And when they're running a tech startup but can't even manage to host their own blog.
First there is this nugget "A live draft has always been in the plans for FantasySportsLive.com, but we feel that we still do not have the critical mass for that to work properly." Yeah, it's either that, or because you're outsourcing all of the design on a shoe string budget and programming a live draft is actually hard, and therefore expensive.
You're doing a bang-up job with the site there too. I love how your server returns an error unless you put "www." before the name. Go to just http://fantasysportslive.com and you get an error page. I know I'd want to deposit my money on a site after seeing errors that any third rate sysadmin could fix.
He goes on to say, quite sloppily, that one of the main advantages of a salary cap draft is that they can be done asynchronously. He's actually somewhat correct there. We've got a pretty awesome idea for an asynchronous game that we're working on as well. There is some benefit to having a game people can play 24/7, even if nobody else wants to. That's why we're going to make it incredibly easy and fun to do so many times a day.
But filling a site with people who want to pick players from a list isn't going to help if your long term plan is to have a site full of live drafts. That's the same as saying "We want to have the most hold'em action on the net, so we're starting off by marketing to 2-7 Triple Draw players." I guess that's not surprising coming from a site that wants to run fantasy sports contests but seems to market exclusively to poker players. It's pretty much the same thing.
In the long run, live drafts are where the money is, so that's where we're starting out.We've actually had a pretty good amount of people playing them too. In fact, since our competitors don't have a live lobby, just some static html list of tournaments, it's pretty easy to track their action. I won't go into details, but I'd be surprised if FSL is even in second place.
Then they have a last paragraph (that, were it written by anyone with a high school diploma, would actually have been three) that starts off talking about patents. Good luck. You can tell their legal budget is as low as their software development one. In fact, I'd go so far as to say (having spoken at great length to a top gaming law firm, another one that's done a lot of work with the bigger FS sites, and one of the lawyers who worked with CBC in their case vs. the MLB) that they are taking a huge legal risk by operating in a few states. If they're ever big enough to register on a few Attorneys General's radars, they're going to have some serious trouble.
And they're probably just plain wrong about the patents. Or wrong about what they think they could do with them even if they were successful. We've spoken to some top-notch IP lawyers as well, and it's not that simple.
My favorite quote of all, though, is definitely this one:
Our competition is just copying our ideas, but have no clue about what our intentions were or what direction the site is heading.
That or two of your three competitors started the process before you did. There's also the fact that you yourself are an uninspired clone of Game Day Draft and the now unsurprisingly defunct Weekly Fantasy Football. Way to copy a giant, steaming pile.
(Also, nice grammar there chief. Only three mistakes in one sentence.)
Our site is radically different, and better. We give a 100% deposit bonus, rather than 10%, and ours isn't sticky. We let people cash it out once they've met a pretty low playthrough. We have live drafts. We have comments, better design, friend functionality, a pretty kick ass affiliate program you can sign up for and use easily. We're kinda like ESPN.com meets Party Poker meets Facebook. You're kinda like Game Day Draft meets, well, Game Day Draft. Good luck with that.
It's hilarious to me that they make the originality claim, when they're just a slightly less lame carbon copy of another site. My dog leaves more originality than that in tightly coiled piles on my front lawn daily. And he's probably a better sysadmin than whoever is running their site too.
Posted by themaroon at 5:45 PM | Comments ()
November 27, 2007
Why I Quit Playing Poker For A Living, Pt. 1
A lot of people ask me why I quit playing poker. When people ask a question like that they're expecting a fairly brief answer, and unfortunately the full version is a long story that's hard to tell in any reasonable amount of time. So I usually give them the executive summary, which was that I felt it was time to move on. That's definitely true, though somewhat vague. But it's better than the answer they seem to expect, which ranges from "I went broke" to "I lost my house in a bad game of 5 card stud. Then my wife left me. And she took the dog," depending on how much they know about poker.
Luckily for me that wasn’t the case. At one point I just knew it was time to find another path through life. Like a bad poker player who just got his pocket aces cracked on the turn, though, I kept pushing it. I continued to play long after my instincts told me give up and suffered the consequences. Had I understood myself better, I could have saved a lot of pain, and a nice chunk of money. But I didn’t. I overstayed my welcome and paid dearly for it.
Why it was time to quit, and why poker eventually ceased to be what it used to for me is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t play it for a living, and near impossible for someone who doesn’t even play as a hobby. I'll try my best for both though. To understand, there are a few things that one has to know about playing poker.
The most important is that no matter how well you play, you often lose. It's just part of the nature of the game, and, for that matter, any game largely subject to random events. Even the best poker players can lose for a very long time. Depending on the variant you're playing that could mean months, or even, in rare cases, years. Losing streaks are an unfortunate fact of life. In fact, for a professional poker player, they're the most unfortunate.
Another thing to understand is that in poker you can't fake it, or at least you shouldn’t. If you're a writer, or an accountant, or a lawyer, or have just about any other occupation I can think of, you can phone it in when you need to and nothing too bad will happen. You can go to work, fly under the radar for a day, not be your fully productive self, and you'll still get paid. They won't cancel your health insurance and you'll still accrue your vacation time. It's likely nobody will even notice, and if they did, they might be understanding, since everyone is in that position sooner or later. At some jobs you can get away with this for days at a time, and a lot of people make entire careers out of it.
Not so in poker. You can play badly for a day, but you're just costing yourself money. You might get lucky and win, or you might not and lose, but you'll win less or lose more than you should have. Either way if you're playing badly you're costing yourself money. In a game where the best player has only a one or two percent edge, playing badly is far worse than not playing at all. It's the only job I know of where, 100% of the time, you will only hurt yourself by functioning suboptimally.
Moreover, there's a huge difference between playing at 100% and 90%. Poker is a game of very fine edges, where you are rewarded for making a lot of good decisions that are, mathematically speaking, only slightly better than the alternatives. So while a programmer who is having a bit of an off day but is still almost as productive as normal can make progress, a poker player who is making almost as many decisions correctly as he normally does can actually go from being a significant winner to a significant loser. If you can't bring your A game to the table, you're better off staying home.
Poker is also an extremely complex game. So much so that computers are unable to function at even a passable level. (Contrast this to chess, where they are able to consistently outperform even the best humans.) As such, nobody plays their best game of poker at all times. It's impossible. Sometimes you're going to be off of your A game. We are irrational, emotional creatures. That's not our fault; we're a product of evolution, and those same emotions that once kept us from choosing the wrong mate or being eaten by a lion hamper us in daily life. And nowhere do they hurt us more than at the poker table, a battleground where cold math, logic and objectivity are a person's only assets, and everything else is a liability.
Playing badly happens a lot more frequently than one might expect, even for the players with the tightest reigns over their emotions (which I was once one of, but am no longer). And it happens the most when you're on one of the inevitable losing streaks. A losing streak in poker is almost inexplicable to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The best way I can translate it to normal people is this:
Imagine you go to work every day and do your absolute best. You work as hard as you can, do everything perfectly, or at least as close to it as humanly possible, and throughout the day, every 15 minutes, your boss comes over and tells you that you are an idiot. Each time he tells you that everything you do is wrong, even if you know it's not. Then instead of paying you, he forces you to write a check to the company.
That's about how stressful losing streaks are. You question everything you do. Every decision you're faced with seems tough, and almost every one you make turns out, in hindsight, to have been wrong. You doubt your ability, because as a human, you've been programmed to equate success with good decision making and failure with bad. You tell yourself over and over that you just have to keep playing the way you always have and it will turn around, but deep down you start to doubt it. You have no choice, it's operant conditioning in action.
Because of the variance, poker is also a game in which very little can ever be known for certain. The high fluctuations make proving any useful theory only possible in hindsight. You can mathematically examine your past results and prove that you are a winning player or a losing player to a high degree of certainty, but it takes such a large sample size that once done, it's entirely useless. You can determine that your wins over the last year (if you played a hell of a lot of hands over that time) were outside of the range attributable to luck. You can discover your realistic minimum and maximum expectation for that time, and if the bottom of the range is above zero, you're mathematically certain to have been a winning player.
But that was last year. The game has changed. You've made changes to your game, and aren’t playing the same way anymore. Your opponents are different. Maybe you moved up a limit or two so they're a little tougher, or maybe you stayed at the same game but the field changed. You can't prove that you are a winner, only that you were. So on a losing streak, you can't simply turn to math or logic to console you, because it can only help explain the past. Ask it if you are playing well right now and the only answer you get is "I don't know. Play a year and ask me again."
The other option is, and many people take this approach, to simply never question yourself, no matter what. Just keep playing the same way and assume that any bad runs are simply due to luck. This, too, is extremely dangerous, because the minute you're wrong, you're headed for broke. The Peter Principle will ensure that you will, at some point, hit a level of competition that's too strong for you, and your ego won't let you adapt. You'll march blindly into the poorhouse.
So being good at poker, at least professionally, means walking a fine line between the two extremes. You must be willing to consider that you should adapt, but not be too hasty to do so, because changing a winning game can be just as bad as not changing a losing one. You must simultaneously have faith in your own abilities and question whether or not you could be playing much better. It's a delicate balance, and one that takes an incredible emotional toll on you.
This is, in a nutshell, why playing poker is often referred to as a "hard way to make an easy living." It's all the stress of the losing streak. To put it in perspective, I once met someone who quit a job as an air traffic controller, long considered the most stressful job in existence, to play poker for a living. He did it for a year and claimed to have made about 25% more than he would have at his job, but went back to his old career because, as he said, it was "far less stressful".
Posted by themaroon at 2:21 AM | Comments ()
November 14, 2007
Update
Things have been going well with the business. We launched, got TechCrunched, and got some pretty good blog reviews and Alexa ratings. According to them we already have more traffic than our competitors and we haven’t even launched our cashier functionality yet. That should be next week some time.
Thanks to having switched to Ruby on Rails the non-flash portion of the site is coming along rapidly. We're all about community, and we're starting to build one there. On tap are all sorts of pokeriffic features, as well as some super stat pages that we hope will put ESPN.com out of business.
Tonight is our first real money tournament, for the people who've won money so far. Should be a fun one.
We've got a pretty good lead on the funding situation, and will probably raise a round in the low seven figures in the near future. We're looking to hire a couple developers, and would love nothing better than one well-versed in poker, so if any of the 8 people who still read this blog are programmers and live in California (or don’t mind moving) drop me a line.
I'm not really missing poker too much. I have been working on some writing, but it's coming along slowly, as I'm doing even more for the tech industry. I have some neglected Word files that need finished there too, one of which I think I'm going to turn into a tech talk for Justin.tv.
I do promise I'll get out my article(s) about why I quit playing poker, which I think are fairly explanatory.
Posted by themaroon at 6:49 PM | Comments (11)
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