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September 29, 2007
Announcement
So I have been working on writing up my poker experience. It's coming out well, and far more voluminous than I had intended. I'm now torn as to what to do with it.
It seems I have two options. One is to keep hammering away and see if I have something long enough for a book. I don't know if I'd be able to get there, and I'm not sure I can come up with any substantial plot arc that would make it as good a read as, say, Shut Up and Deal using my own experience alone. But I could tie in other threads, much the way Positively Fifth Street did with the Binion murder trial, and I have a few ideas for that.
The other option is to cut out a lot of details and shorten it down into a few blog posts. You guys don't want to read 100 pages of fine-grained detail. Well, some of you might, but I suspect most would rather poke yourself in the eye with a fork.
I'm a little pressed for time, so I won't be doing either quickly. I've put in more hours in the last five months of working on this startup than I ever did in a year of poker. I haven't come anywhere close to achieving my goal of blogging once a day, and so I suspect that whichever route I take, progress will be slow. My intent had been to serialize it, but I just can't bring myself to click "publish" on one part, knowing I'll regret the inability to fix it later.
So time is my major constraint. And in that vein, it's time to announce why. Some of you guessed by my donkey post (which, by the way, was not in reference to Chris Fargis) that it is fantasy sports for money. I'm not affiliated with Chris's site, which makes it kinda humorous that two friends would end up competing in the same industry, but then again I guess we played in the same $30/$60 tables plenty of times.
And my site is going to be substantially different. Right now we have one week football leagues with live drafts (I'm no donkey) but our long term plan is far beyond that. We're moving the code base over to Ruby on Rails, for those of you with a technical bent, which will enable us to build out a fully featured site rapidly and keep improving on it. We've got a ton of surprises in store for when we actually roll out.
We're currently in beta testing mode, and are doing nightly freerolls to help us develop the software. If you'd like to join, go ahead and sign up here. You'll have a shot every night at winning some free money with no restrictions, which you'll be able to cash out or play with as soon as we roll out money games and cashier functionality, which should be in the very near future.
This is actually an idea that we had over three years ago now. At the time there were a number of things preventing us from going through with it. But the MLB vs. CBC ruling and the carve-out in the UIGEA essentially solved them for us. Our idea has evolved over the intervening years (and especially the last few months) to add in a lot of web 2.0 era functionality, and so I can say confidently that it will be a radically new (and better) fantasy sports experience.
If you're a sports fan and would like to win some cash give it a shot and tell me what you think.
Posted by themaroon at 1:57 AM | Comments (1)
September 21, 2007
Cheaters
So it seems like someone might have managed to hack Absolute Poker, probably in the same way Planet Poker was compromised back in the online poker industry's dark ages. No big surprise. They've been a giant steaming pile since day one. If you'd told me that someone managed to hack a poker site's shuffling algorithm and made me guess which site, they would have been my first choice.
There are also rumors abounding of bots being caught on various poker sites. To a lot of people, this may look like the beginning of the end of online poker. I'm not buying it.
For one thing, I would guess that somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of people who play online poker honestly believe it's rigged. And they play anyway. If thinking the game is explicitly designed to steal their money doesn't stop them, why should the threat of a bot? I suppose there's a big difference between believing something is rigged and having "proof" (I use quotations because the evidence in question is a 2+2 thread, albeit a convincing one). But there's also a big difference between Absolute Poker (which appears to have been programmed by juvenile chimpanzees) and the other major sites. I've little fear of Stars being similarly compromised.
And for another, online poker has been an endangered species since day one, but the apocalypse is still a good distance away. Anyone who knows anything about computers understands that one day they will be better at poker than we are. It's just a question of when. Most people involved in AI seem to agree that we have quite a bit of time, but then, this is in an industry where 20 years is basically forever. My largely uneducated guess is 5.
Once that day comes though, online poker will be unplayable. There's nothing you'll be able to do to separate humans from machines. Poker sites might throw out CAPTCHAs to make you feel safe, but they'll be just like toiletry procedures in airports, an easily circumventable sham of a procedure that does nothing but inconvenience innocent people.
Let's suppose bots can make $10 per hour at the tables, a pittance by poker standards and something I could train any reasonably intelligent person to do in a month or two. Suppose someone has a large network of them. Poker sites can only send so many CAPTCHAs to each player without risking alienating all humans. No actual person is going to fill out one every time they want to bet, the game would be slowed to unplayability.
That limitation will make it such that our bot network operator could simply pay some Chinese people $1 an hour to fill out the forms. Every time the bot encounters a CAPTCHA, or an audio file, or whatever other lame protection measures the sites may try to invent, the bot simply copies it and sends it instantly to the Chinese call center, where it is filled out right away, sent back, and entered by the bot into the poker site. Assuming one operator could handle the CAPTCHAs for 10 bots (and I suspect it would be a lot more) each of which makes $10 per hour the bot masters could even afford to pay Americans with MBAs to do it if they wanted. The economics are beyond feasible, they're trivial.
So online poker is in serious danger. There's no way to stop the bots from overrunning it. As AI gets better, and that dollar per hour rate goes up, more people will jump into the fray. The law of accelerating returns will take effect, and soon the online poker world will be entirely uninhabitable. It will essentially be rigged, though not by the house, and bots will compete against each other for the money.
Posted by themaroon at 5:23 PM | Comments ()
September 18, 2007
Heeeehaaaaw
Posted by themaroon at 12:50 AM | Comments (3)
September 9, 2007
State Of The Blog Address
So I've been debating for a while what to do with this blog. I haven't been playing or watching poker much lately. But I have begun thinking about it on occasion, especially since I'm moving to a house a stone's throw away from Bay 101. In some respects I suppose I never really stopped. Poker gives you a new outlook on life, more so than any other hobby (except maybe writing) that I know if, and it carries with you, coming to the forefront of your mind in unexpected situations.
Lately I've been reflecting on my poker career, which is, at least for the present, far behind me, and I've come to a number of realizations. And that, I also realized, should be where I take this blog.
I think I'm going to start by running through my poker experience more or less from the beginning. It's going to be long, and I'll serialize it in shorter pieces so it's actually readable. It might take me quite a while to get it all done, as I plan on writing it well, and that takes a lot of time, which is in short supply for me lately. I am splitting a four day drive with my friend John this week though, so I imagine inspiration will strike me for at least some of it.
Posted by themaroon at 6:40 PM | Comments (3)