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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 ()