Collecting Evidence Without Playing

As long as PokerStars keeps offering more than a dozen tables with a double digit waiting list I will be able to duplicate this forever.

Tonight's target was the Albanian poker master arantalib, who I moticed has also masterfully mixed in the letters of "ALBANIA" into his screen name. My Calculatron Word Processor 305XS150 (Microsoft notebad) also tells me that there is a T and an R thrown in their for good measure and that it is at least 61.3% likely that it stands for "Tournament Ruler."

Scanning through the tables with the massive waiting lists he(it) had the most chips of anyone. Almost 2 million. And the table has four other positions that have a combined more than 1 million.

Now take a break from reading and put on your math caps. Are they on? Good. Let's proceed.

Now, let's be generous and assume optimum conditions for the five leaders. They don't get involved in hands versus each other. They only feed on the waiting list arrivals. This is a 40k buy in game and re-buys are also 40k. Let's round down the leaders chip total to 3 million even for ease of calculation. 3 million / 40,000 per victim is a net increase of beating 750 all-ins.

Now observe that there are some 8 second warnings out there and some time bank usage. It's not the fastest game out there. Let's be generous and assume one hand finishes every 30 seconds. And that is WAY too generous. 750 wins/ 320 minutes = 6.25 hours for this table to reach this state.

Am I really supposed to believe that someone is going to invest damn near half of their waking day to playing a free money game? No way. The sole (or actually soulless) reason for yje existence of these tables is so that the software can log in another hand played in the push for 100 billion.

And in my 45 minute observation Aran (can I call you that? Arie? Armesiter? The Arminator? Little Aran?) actually played like pretty much a donk. Raise big on the turn. Then bluff on the river by making a smaller bet on the river. Folding after every call was presented with a big bet. Only won a single hand during my 45 minutes and when I bugged out had something like 1,725,000 chips,

Take your math caps off now, watch a movie, service the significant other, pet the dog, drink a beer and do anything but join those waiting lists.