Stasis

The problem with posting when all that you are really doing is playing B&M poker is that your range of topics is somewhat limited. You can mention another angle-shoot that you have witnessed, or recall another bad beat (one-outer for a straight flush, anyone?) or recount the tale of the man who called a board of AAKK7 with 55 in his hand.

But, well, all of these have happened before and will happen again, and even I don't find them that interesting. You trundle on, winning a bit here, losing a bit there, and trying to keep your head above water until you hit a short-term "rush" that, theoretically, makes up most of your profit for the session.

I did complete Robert Harris's Imperium and I look set to finish Fingersmith, a book I have tried to read before but have given up on.

Imperium is a great read. Harris is no master writer in the mould of Boyd, McEwan or Faulks, but he has the ability to make history interesting and to make you want to read more about his subject matter (in this case, The Roman Republic and the later Imperial Rome). This is no mean feat. Middlebrow bestselling fiction at its absolute best.

The success and praise for Fingersmith (Sarah Waters) continues to baffle me. I can see how Waters pastiches the Victorian style, but writing styles have moved on from the Victorian era for a reason. And I don't think that Waters is all that good at it, either. I've got 100 pages to go and I don't really give a flying toss about either of the "heroines", or indeed about any of the other characters.

Reading these two books shows how both authors have researched their period, but one has made the era "come alive", while the other has created a two-dimensional melodrama. Oh, and it's fairly obvious how Fingersmith will end as well. It strikes me as the kind of book for people who wish that Charlotte Bronte had written more books like Jane Eyre, or that Wilkie Collins had been as prolific as James Ellroy. Yes, Collins was a great writer, but he was a writer of his time, and times have moved on. I assume that lovers of Waters just see stuff by McEwan as being "a bit modern for my taste".

Figures for trip so far. Flat. Including comps, modestly up.

Estimated standard deviation, $40 an hour. Wow, that low.

Update

Live poker can be darned boring at times. Thank god fo Zen And The Art of Poker.

Some recent updates have been interesting.

Neteller has said that "it is currently unclear how NETELLER, a European company, with no assets, presence or employees in the US, would be affected by this bill. Once the regulations have been written, NETELLER will have a clearer view of which companies are affected, how those companies will be expected to comply, and any possible resulting impact on NETELLER and its US facing business. "

Neteller is perhaps the best possible test case for the US contravening World Trade Organization principles, a fact that Neteller hints at in the above paragraph. Of course, the response can be "sure, go ahead and do it if you like, but just don't have any of your executives set foot on US soil. We might lose in court, but your executives will have a miserable time of it". Standard bully-boy strategy that has been used by the US before in the WTO.

With Neteller being "at arms length", would US financial institutions have the nerve to say to the athorities, "but we aren't dealing with the online gambling companies, we are only dealing with Neteller. It is not within our capabilities or remit to esstablish what Neteller does with funds it receives from customers who have accounts with us"? This would be a powerful defence, but that does not mean that the US financial institutions would employ it; mainly because they tend to be a bunch of cowards who would rather have a quiet life. And would the US enforcement authorities try to push the financial institutions to stay away from Neteller?

However (and this is where I come in), it would be interesting to see Charles Schwab tell me that it would no longer accept funds transferred TO it (not from it) from Neteller, particularly if I start some non-gambling-related transactions on Neteller just to muddy the waters. I am a UK citizen with an International Schwab account. Neteller is a non-US operation. Neteller might have strong legal grounds if Schwab stated that the Port Security Act was the reason for it stopping the Electronic Funds Transfer facility that I currently use. (I could, of course, get the money into the Schwab account by getting a cheque from Neteller and then sending a cheque to Schwab, although I would then suffer the excange rate hit twice over). However, the farcical nature of the affair is illustrated by that simple point. If Schwab is breaking the law by taking the funds from Neteller, then it is breaking the law by taking the same funds from me. At what point does money received through gambling activity become "different" money?

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On the Party Poker side, the company continues to illustrate the extent to which it doesn't really understand online poker players in any way, shape, or form. Look at this statement to 2+2:

Keep in mind, PartyGaming is a large company with a large player base. We are not “closing shop”. We are leaving the accounts of US players open because we are committed to finding new and interesting offerings. Our US community will remain.

For non US players, poker will go on as planned. Our games will continue and we will be offering more time zone friendly tournaments and promotions.

"We are committed to finding new and interesting offerings"? Such as, what? A shopping catalogue? Basically the line: "we are leaving the accounts of US players open" translates as: "we won't be sending you your money back unless you ask for it because, hell, it might as well earn interest for us as for you".

But you have to like the phrase "more time-zone friendly tournaments and promotions" for the non-US market. Well, one would expect so. Let's, for once, look at the glass as half-full. The non-US market is of a size that the US market was at in early 2003, I would guess. It is also a far less "mature" market than the US is today, where everyone and his wife has probably tried poker and lost $50 or thereabouts. If marketing efforts are focused on Asia and Europe, then growth could be maintained. Although the more diligent US winner will hang around, not all of them (e.g., the guys with day jobs) will be able to exploit the European and Asian evening players. Similarly, at least some recreational losing US players will remain. On the plus side (for Europe) we can now peg any guy with a US tag to his name as a likely "serious" player. Forewarned is forearmed.

The other excellent news is that:

Monster: Unfortunately, the structure of the PartyPoker.com Monster tournament makes it untenable to continue should the act becomes law. Accordingly, if and when that happens, it will be discontinued. At that time, we will convert Monster freerolls into cash equivalent amounts and refund that amount to any customers with unused freerolls. We will be converting the freerolls based on the expected value of the actual tournament that it is good for, as well as expected value for the next stages (monthly and final).

This alone indicates to what extent the incompetent fucks at Party have been caught on the hop by the legislation passed last Friday. I mean, how can executives be this hopeless? They institute a long-term rip-off plan that, when legislation that they know about is passed, they have to abandon. Good for us, but worrying for any of the the poor saps who still have PartyGaming shares. Here we have a company that:

a) clearly had been using the ostrich approach to the proposed legislation, with good (i.e., over-optimistic) news being fed upwards along the food chain, Stalin-like, so that CEO Mitch Graber must have been genuinely shocked when the law went through.

b) has abandoned its interim dividend on the somewhat spurious grounds that the money can be better used for expansion now that buying opportunities have become available. This might be true, but it isn't the kind of "change of plan" that investors want to hear. If they want to be involved in buying other companies (rather than receiving dividends, as promised), then there are other places to invest. Do they really want Party, a company that has shown a distinct lack of tactical and strategic awareness, spending their money for them? Personally, I'd rather have the dividend which I could then use to buy the shares in potential takeover targets.

c) is talking about vague "new and interesting offerings" which, quite clearly, they have no more idea about than you or I. Er, you are PartyGaming. That's what you do. You have stopped gaming activities for US customers. That would make any new offerings you come up with for US customers interesting indeed.


d) has part-owners who have pocketed several billions of institutional investors' money (whom, I would like to point out, include pension funds and other areas where many of you have a stake) by selling off their shares.


This, in other words, is a bad company that was owned by bad people and has since then been run by incompetent people (and, as usual, invested in by incompetent fund managers -- but don't send me down that route). At the moment, Party is desperately trying to crank up its non-US operations at about five times the speed that it was doing so before (did anyone notice more "Euro-centric" bias before now in the timing of tournaments, or in the focus of the software? Not me.).

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At the moment I can still access Party from the US, but this e-mail was posted on 2+2 by The Lebowski. The acccuracy of the e-mail can't be verified, because the incompetence of the language used makes it look to me as if it has been written by a donkey in India who might not know the true situation. However, it's probably the best indication of the situation at Party as we know it.

(BTW, you can always spot an Indian writer by the phrase "as per the" .. . it's like a fingerprint.)

With reference to your email, you can play PartyPoker.com from
Hong-Kong, South Korea and Singapore but not from Thailand. As Thailand is
considered a blocked country.

As per the deposit option available in that period you will be able to
make a deposit and play.

Please be informed, Only if you are accessing the site from outside the
United States then only you can play.

If your PartyAccount is registered with a US address, you will not be
able to place wagers on our sites, regardless of your location when
accessing your account. If your registration does not properly reflect your
address, you may contact customer service and, upon providing
verification for your new address, your registered address can be changed.

In other words, not only will you need a verified non-US address, but you will (if you are really in the US but are pretending to be living elsewhere) need a proxy server system to fool Party into thinking that you are somewhere other than the US.

Now, this is possible to do, but it requires effort. No US recreational player will make that kind of effort.

Indicative of how irredeemably fucking thick some poker players are comes in the form of a post from Artsemis.

"Not everyone needs a table full of fish to win. "

If the guy is really a losing trolling college kid twat, then the post is irritating, but understandable. But if he is a winning poker player, then the stupidity is unparalleled. Where does he think the money he is winning is ultimately coming from if he is beating other "good" players? Why, ths fish, of course.

It is this aspect that must have Party crapping itself. After all, look at the early press releases from Empire Online when it lost its Party player base overnight. "No worries", they said, "Empire has a strong player base of its own, which plays far more often than the typical Party player and generates far more rake". Yeah, right, which lasted all of 48 hours as its almost entire player base deserted in droves once the Party player base vanished. And, even if you won money off the Empire Online rakebackers, you were fucked, because they left as well.

This is a factor that Party must be aware of (although, given its recent incompetence, I wouldn't bet on it). If it loses its fish, the multiplier effect is enormous. Winning players who stop being winning players, stop playing. In fact, if they have Pokertracker, they won't even sit down at a table that is only full of sharks. If Party canot generate losing players from outside the US at the rate that it produced them from inside the US, then its turnover will drop by far more than the marginal fall-off in new customers. I would guess that a 50% drop in new customer acquisition (say, $10m in rake over a month, plucking a number out of the air) would result in a $30m drop in rake in total, at least. And this will happen the instant that Bush passes the law, which could happen as early as today.

I hope that the Party executives in London and Gibraltar are absolutely crapping themselves.