Changing the Rules

As the foremost critic of Internet poker on the planet I get a lot of attention. And the result is often like this shooting themselves in the foot. For twenty plus years the new player buy in has been 2000 chips. And now magically it's 999. You got that right 999. Not 1000.

You see, this number is perfect for running 500 chip buy in games where AI can mindlessly raise and someone with real talent won't accidentally stumble upon the table. Newbies stumble. They only have 499 chips left. Grrrr. Can't play another of those.

And it's not like the log in screen posts some friendly message about a upgrade.

Dabbling in PokerStars 50/50 games

Here's the way the game works. Once the table has half of the people who registered left it's over. You can conceivably finish in the money and lose chips, because the payout is the amount of the buy in without the ridiculous administrative fee tacked on plus $1 for every 100 chips you have.

It's basically pretty stupid. And just the latest bizarre addition to the weird games that get offered that no serious poker player would ever submit themselves to. The payoff is so low that it's amazing how these tables fill up so quickly. Kinda like a 5000 player tourney with a 100k buy in that you have to play for five hours to win $1,000 play money chips.

When I played on Full Tilt one of my favorite and bizarre games was one where you got points for knocking out opponents and lasting longer than others. Several times I placed in the money folding every single hand. There is some similarity here. I've registered for about ten of these and I've placed in the money on every single one. It's a simple matter of outlasting the AI beating each other to death.

Poker Sharknado

There's a movie that we love here at The Big Laydown. Sharknado. Why do we love it? Mindless escapism. Sharks getting sucked up into a tornado and getting tossed into people. The sharks magically just happen to have their mouths open when they land on a human. Don't think about science. That will just ruin the joyride. The phrase "a fish out of water" doesn't apply.

So I get a new dog and take a little bit of a vacation from PokerFrauds and what do I get? The 200k minimum buy in tables. Obviously filled with poker sharks not content to play for paltry stakes with blinds of 100/200. These sharks play with 2500/5000 blinds.

Considering that multiple tables are filled with these "people" it just shows that PokerFrauds doesn't care about the math.

Math and science are our friends. Me and my crack team of mathematicians (me and the dog) are puzzling on how a free money table can be filled with players that must have megamillions of chips. Oh, they must be megalodons like in that other classic shark movie Jurassic Shark. Thawed out from an ancient glacier and creating havoc in a fresh water lake. Well that science doesn't work. Maybe if it was set in the future you could explain it away with a mutation that sharks could breathe outside of a warm oceany venue.

Maybe if these tables were empty it could explain the math. It's just another poorly thought out idea that has AI playing against AI.