The Poker Moth

That’s right, they’re going to have to do without me this year. I WILL NOT WHORE FOR HARRAHS AND ESPN!

Admittedly, I’ve never actually played in a WSOP tournament, and the closest I’ve got to one are satellites… I’ve been pretty damn close in two sats this year, (one for the Main Event and one for the WSOPE), but both of those were freerolls, so I can honestly say that I haven’t contributed as much as a cent to Harrahs this year, and it’s going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. I’m sure this announcement will send their stock price tumbling, so I better justify my decision for the benefit of all those blameless and soon-to-be-unemployed Harrahs employees, who’ll no doubt want to know why I’ve ruined their lives.

Basically, it’s because of this. Don’t bother clicking the link, though – I’ll fisk it for you.

“The World Series of Poker® (WSOP) Presented by Milwaukee’s Best Light today announced a groundbreaking change that will more closely align the televised presentation of the world’s largest, richest and most prestigious poker tournament with other premier sports broadcasts.”

Aside – you know the whole “is poker a sport” debate? Can we just say that it isn’t, and then tell ESPN to fuck off and leave the GAME of poker alone?  No? Anyway, back to the outrageousness, and here’s the big punchline…

“The last nine players of the $10,000 World Championship of No-Limit Texas Hold’em, known as the Main Event, will compete on November 9-10 instead of the originally scheduled date of July 16.”

Srsly. When I first heard about this, I assumed it was a wind up. It’s not. It’s actually happening. When the 10th player gets knocked out of the Main Event, ESPN are going to bag up everybody’s chips and stick them in a vault for FOUR FUCKING MONTHS. Why? Let’s ask those genius outofthebox thinkers over at Harrahs!

“Our intent is to provide an even bigger stage for our players,” said Jeffrey Pollack, Commissioner of the World Series of Poker.  “Now fans and viewers will ask ‘who will win’ our coveted championship bracelet instead of ‘who won.’ The excitement and interest surrounding our final nine players will be unprecedented.

This change in how the Main Event final table is staged will bring the excitement and drama of high-stakes WSOP tournament play closer to millions of fans around the globe.”

Now, Jeffrey, you’re not being entirely honest there, are you? The problem for you and ESPN isn’t people asking “who won?”, it’s them asking “who the fuck are these no-marks?”. And you’re looking for four months to hype the inevitable nonuplet of nonentities who will be stinking up the final table this year. In a way, i can’t blame you… the last few years have seen very few star names on the final tables. Matusow appeared briefly with a 9th place finish in ‘05, Allen Cunningham was the only name to make the FT in ‘06. And last year was… well. Who’s the current world champion? No googling. You know the one, the irritating god-botherer with the equally zealous and noisy family. Come on, what’s his name?

No, me neither. And what’s more, everybody knows that the reigning world champion (in all but name) was Freddy Deeb, and is now Scotty Nguyen (baby!), because the $50k HORSE event is now the only one that matters. Win that, and you deserve to be called the best poker player in the world. Win the Main Event, and you’re just the next Jerry Yang. (Yeah, I googled him). Or, as the Harrahs flacks put it -

“Continuing the trailblazing efforts that have made the WSOP the industry standard”…

You do really have to wonder what these idiots are on, don’t you? Who made the WSOP the (god help us) “industry standard” poker tournament? Are you sure it was Harrahs and ESPN? Really? Not, say, Benny Binion? Surely they meant to say “continuing the cackhanded meddling that has completely devalued the prestige of the Main Event”?

…”this move is being made in close collaboration with ESPN, the television rightsholder of the WSOP, and the WSOP Players Advisory Council (PAC), the commissioner-appointed committee of professional and amateur poker players who provide guidance and perspective to the WSOP leadership team.

“It’s an exciting time for the World Series of Poker and ESPN,” said Jamie Horowitz, senior producer, ESPN Content Development. “This adjustment will add a new element to a very successful and popular event.  We look forward to documenting all of the exciting stories that make the WSOP Main Event the seminal competition in all of poker.”

Ah, that’s a little bit closer to the truth. Why not go the whole hog, though? Turn it into a reality TV show – get each final tablist a big name coach, and document them learning how to play poker properly? I want to know about their JOURNEY! Let’s do away with the cards, and instead get Simon Cowell, Sharon Osbourne  and Piers Morgan to sit in judgment above them on a glass desk suspended above the final table,  buzzing players out of the tournament when they grow tired of their repertoire of chip tricks? Fuck it, just run a phone vote!

“This is a huge step forward for poker and more specifically poker on television because it will help create more buzz around the final table and that is good for all of us,” said Daniel Negreanu, a WSOP PAC member, three-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner and one of today’s most successful and popular poker professionals.  “Not only will this innovative step create more buzz for the final table, the added time prior to the final table will help get poker mainstream media attention.  I’m very excited about this decision and can’t wait to see it all unfold, hopefully from a seat at the final table!”

Oh, Dan. I used to like you, you know. But we’re not done with the madness yet. You ready for this?

The 39th annual World Series of Poker will take place from May 30th to July 14th at the Rio® All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.  The Main Event will begin on July 3rd, with the Final Table being determined on July 14th. The nine players who advance to the Final Table will return to the Rio on November 9th to play down to just two players.   The final two, will go head-to-head late in the evening on November 10th to determine the champion and winner of poker’s ultimate prize.

The winner of the Main Event is expected to be crowned in the early hours of November 11.  ESPN will edit the two-day Final Table action and televise it in a two-hour program from 9:00-11:00 PM ET on Tuesday, November 11 just hours after the winner is crowned. This is akin to television coverage of the Olympic Games, where because of time zone differences, the telecaster schedules programs “same day” in primetime to provide the largest possible audience a convenient viewing time.

In other words, they’re delaying the thing by four months in order to NOT show live coverage of the final table. Good grief. And hang on, just a second… what did Pollack say earlier? “Now fans and viewers will ask ‘who will win’ our coveted championship bracelet instead of ‘who won.’” O RLY?

ESPN will begin its coverage of the 2008 World  Series of Poker on Tuesday, July 22. Viewers will see two hours of original poker programming every Tuesday through November 11 (except November 4 when a special preview of the Final Table will be aired at 10 p.m.).  Telecasts will be aired at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. July 22 through September 30 and at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. from October 7 through November 11.

Each of the players who make it to the WSOP Main Event Final Table will receive ninth place prize money on July 14, when the finalists are determined.  Harrah’s will then provide each of those players with an all expense paid trip for two for their return to Las Vegas in November to play the final portion of the tournament.

From July 14 to November 9, a span of 117 days, players will have an opportunity to line up sponsorships, coaches, review the play of all their competitors, participate in other tournaments, and take advantage of the new publicity and promotional opportunities that will be available.

It absolutely blows my mind that anyone could consider this to be a good thing. Unbefuckinglievable.

How did I miss this? Well, possibly because I get all my poker news from two really, really terrible RSS sources. Welcome to a fortnight ago, courtesy of Pokernews and Pokerworks. And, thinking about it, a family member asked me what the deal was with the Betfair glitch last weekend, and I just looked at him blankly, and forgot about it. (I was pissed).

So, here’s the hot poker news from the beginning of February – Betfair orders poker players to return winnings.

In short, they released a software update which was broken in a rather serious way; in six-handed STTs, in the event of several players going all-in and the tournament being won on that hand, the software was unable to determine who got what prize money. So it paid everybody. Quite how anyone realised this is open to debate; the most plausible situation being that everybody pushed their chips in when three handed in a 6-max STT, the chipleader won the pot taking first place prize money, but the other two players each received second place cash. (Only two people are supposed to get paid in 6-max STTs). Once the third place finisher realised this, he somehow managed to communicate the news to the other players on the site, and they embarked on a spree of 6-maxes with every player moving all-in on the very first hand. Apparently, in that spot, everybody got paid! And once a group of six players had got together to milk the glitch, they worked their way up the limits, until they were merrily grinding their way through thousands of pounds of free money per hour.

I’d be extremely sceptical of this story if it weren’t for the timing; all this apparently took place between 3am and 6am on a weeknight, and at that time, Betfair is dead enough (especially at the higher buy-ins) to allow six people to continuously play against each other without interlopers getting in the way and messing things up. An interloper would mess it up quite badly, though, as would a split pot. (What are the odds of a split in a six-way random all-in? 10%? I genuinely have no idea…). Nonetheless, I guess it is possible that things could have happened that way, although I’m still not ruling out the possibility that this is a viral marketing scam. It all sounds so unlikely…

News bit first – the Kahnawake Gaming Commish have published their judgment on the Absolute cheating scandal. You can read the whole thing here (.pdf).

The allegation against Absolute, (which the KGC have now confirmed as fact, fining AP $500,000 plus costs), is that a high-ranking employee of the poker site used software to allow him to see the hole cards of his opponents. Pretty shocking, huh?

I first head about this scandal in a typical chatbox argument with some idiot who was claiming that Pokerstars diddle their RNG (the random number generator that “deals” the cards) to generate more action. I was responding with my usual routine about how the risks of doing that outweigh the benefits so heavily that no-one would be foolish enough to try it, when someone else at the table pipes up with “what about Absolute, huh? They got caught cheating!”. That shut me up for a while. Well, a couple of minutes, at least.

The first thing to mention here is that what happened at Absolute was not a systemic, site-wide “rigging”; it was the action of one player (with several accounts), and the subsequent external audit of Absolute’s software has found no evidence of anything wrong with their RNG. However, that’s by the by. What’s really important is the manner in which the deception was exposed – the fix was rumbled by the other players on the site, who realised that something was rotten in the state of Denmark very quickly. The proof arrived when a player finished second in a $10+1 NLHE MTT to a player called “Potripper” who he suspected of cheating, and complained to Absolute. Absolute support staff (who were presumably unaware of the actions of the individual employee) sent this player a master hand history file for the disputed tournament, containing all the hole cards for all players, along with details of observers and IP addresses. This coincided with a large amount of general disquiet on poker fora about various unusual occurrences on the site, and before long someone analysed the Potripper file and realised that his phenomenal reading ability seemed to coincide with the presence of a certain observer at the table. An observer with an IP address that was traced back to Absolute. Game over, man.

Here’s the 2+2 thread outlining the scandal’s history, and also the thread containing all the hand histories – if you’ve ever wondered what a poker tournament would look like when one player can see everyone’s cards, there’s your answer. It’s fascinating stuff.

And this is good news for online poker… why? Well, note how this wasn’t exposed by a fellow Absolute employee who was experiencing pangs of guilt, but by the other, honest players. And it didn’t take long – allegations were flying within days of the scam’s inception. Now, it’s fair to say that the cheater wasn’t exactly subtle, and if he’d used his privileged knowledge a little more sparingly (rather than ruthlessly exploiting his edge on every possible hand), he could well have got away with it for much longer… but when a cheater reduces the risk of being caught, he also reduces the returns. And cheaters are greedy, almost by definition; there may possibly be other “superuser” players out there who possess the self-control to milk the tables without drawing attention to themselves, but they’re giving up so much of their edge by doing so that they’re barely more of a concern than poker bots.

But the wider implications of the scandal will certainly ensure that other poker sites are going to be ten times less likely to consider any form of RNG massaging than they were before the AP scandal, and they didn’t exactly have a huge amount of incentive in the first place, as most poker players are quite capable of generating excess action without help from dodgy RNGs. However, in the new, post-AP climate, there’s no fucking way that a site’s going to try it on; they’ve just seen a great example of how the natural paranoia of the average online poker player, coupled with the ever-vigilant stat nerds busily crunching enormous databases of hand histories, are as fearsome as any external audit.

There’ll always be colluding players, and there will always be bots. The thing about colluders and bots is that they’re shit at poker. (True story: I initially got involved with online poker because I was planning to collude with a friend, but I never got round to it; I found winning honestly was so simple that cheating was completely unnecessary). Superusers? They might exist, but they’ll be caught the second they get greedy. Systemic RNG diddling by stock-market listed companies who are independently audited, and make fortunes without cheating? Don’t make me laugh.

Further reading – AbsolutePokerCheats.com