Online Poker

Finally, a response from Neteller about the questions I posed in the comments on this post a couple of weeks ago.

I'll try to speak to them next week, but first I wanted to share my email reader's insight on the matter:

Doesn't really do them any favours, does it? 

In case you had any concerns about how secure your money is with Neteller's dodgy prepaid debit card, this reply I had from them should help to scare you away completely.

Looking for a way that I'd be happy to use it to take some of my money out at an ATM, I asked whether it was possible to have two separate accounts so that my whole balance would not be available to a card that has zero consumer protection.

Thank you for sending us an email.

Unfortunately one customer can have only one NETELLER account and one Net+ Card. 

The security is our first priority and NETELLER has various security measures against fraud or theft. But the system can never be perfect. In this sense we would think it is important to use the NETELLER account and the Net+ for not a big amount depositing only the amount necessary to use.

In fact the limits of cash withdraw as well as the purchase using Net+ Card are quite limited; For cash withdraw 500GBP/day and 1500GBP/4 days and for purchase 1500GBP/day and 4500GBP/4 dasy.

Please understand NETELLER is offering the service of money transfer online and is not a bank. 

It's quite the supreme failure in terms of offering reassurance to a customer.

If I may paraphrase: "Our system isn't perfect", "Don't trust us with more money than you absolutely have to", "The most you could lose to fraud is eight grand a week" and of course "We are not a bank".

We knew the last part already, but at least they're not trying to pretend any more.

The Grand Series of Poker III is two weeks of online tournaments hosted by Gala Poker.

With relatively affordable buy-ins compared to other online series ($50 to $200 per event) and added value for a leaderboard of top finishers across the series, I'd decided I would take a punt at this.

I'd even accepted that if things were going well, I'd have to play the 6-handed Omaha tournament.  That would be seriously -EV, but it's +Eleaderboardpoints, so what can you do?

According to Gala's web site, things were due to kick off tonight at either 8pm or 9pm UK time.

I'm vague about the start time because it's not exactly clear.  The site says: "All GSOP events start at 21:00 CET (20:00 GMT)"

This is confusing, because right now, with daylight savings time in effect, GMT is two hours behind CET, not one.

Given that the clock at the top of Gala's own web site shows the time incorrectly - for example it says "19:30 GMT" when it's actually 19:30 BST - my best guess was that it would start at 8pm UK time (20:00 on Gala's not-GMT clock) but I figured there was a chance it would actually be 9pm (20:00 actual GMT, so 21:00 BST).

So, when I thought I was turning up in plenty of time to play it, logging on at just before 7pm to load my account and pre-register, you can imagine my surprise when I saw the event start right in front of my eyes almost exactly at the moment I went to buy in.

I guess that'll teach me to check the times in the lobby when I want to play a poker tournament on an unfamiliar site.

Not that it would have done me much good, because for this tournament the lobby showed a start time of 19:00 CET.

So that would be 17:00 GMT or 18:00 BST, right?  (Trust me, it's right).

And yet there it was, starting at 7pm - and with no option of late registration.  I just don't know how I could have seen that coming.

I thought I'd call Gala to see if anyone knew what time it was.

"Hi, your poker series event tonight, what time was it meant to start?"

I'd naively assumed that just because they'd answered the phone with "Gala Poker, can I help you" that I'd be speaking to someone who actually worked for Gala and would therefore be aware of this multi-million dollar poker event.  I should know better by now.

So I gave him the full title of the tournament and waited patiently on hold for an answer.

"Sir, I just checked and on the web site it says 20:00 GMT, but as we're in the summer right now, it's actually an hour behind and it started a few minutes ago".

"But that would make it 9pm, wouldn't it?" 

"I'm sorry, I mean it's an hour ahead"

"OK, whatever.  But it's only 18:00 GMT right now". 

He put me on hold to go and check, and came back a couple of minutes later to tell me that he'd looked at a world clock and it said the current time was just after 20:00 GMT.

The world clock web site I found told a different story (this screenshot taken after the call, but compare GMT to the times in Dublin and Frankfurt).

After holding once more, I came to the conclusion that nobody in the call centre knew what time the tournament was meant to start, what time it actually did start or even what time it was in the part of the world they were meant to be talking to.

At least he gave an honest explanation: "I'm from India and I'm struggling myself to see what's going on with all the different timezones involved here".  He took my details and said he would ask a real person at actual Gala to send me an accurate schedule.  Whether they'll have any more of a clue remains to be seen.

To be fair, this was one of the most helpful Indian call centre dudes I've dealt with in a long time.  Very polite, and he seemed keen to help me out with something that nobody could actually do anything about.

Really, it was just me having a whinge and being a bit awkward.

In a sit-and-go tournament at PokerStars, I'd reported a hand where two players (showing as from the same country) appeared to dump chips to each other to prevent one from being blinded all-in on the bubble.

Naturally, that fate then fell to me.

Blinds were 200/400 with a 25 ante. Villian 1, sitting on about half the chips in play, raised to 1,200 and then folded after Villain 2 moved all in for a total of 1,275.

With the dead blinds and antes, his pot odds were 37-1. It's an instant call for just 75 more chips, even if all you have in your hand is one 3 and a bridge score card.

A couple of weeks later I got a reply from PokerStars with the result of their investigation.  It said they couldn't find any history of these guys playing together in the past and concluded that the first player almost certainly clicked on the wrong button and folded by accident.

They even found hands earlier in the same tournament where those two had played hard against each other - and sent me two hand histories that showed it.

PokerStars has a reputation for providing first class support to players and they've yet to disappoint me.  Ideally I wanted my $16 back, but I can accept their findings.

I had forgotten that after this hand I wasn't able to keep my mouth shut at the table, and their response also went on to reprimand me because of this:

On a related note, I noticed that you accused these players of collusion at the table. Three problems exist when you make an accusation at the table:

1) You may be accusing two perfectly innocent people of being dishonest. If they are innocent, then you have sullied their reputations amongst other players at the table without cause.

2) If they are guilty, you have just alerted them to your suspicions. This allows them to come up with cover stories and alter their play all of which makes it more difficult for us to confirm the suspicion.

3) In an environment where there is already concerns about cheating in different forms, making such an accusation only serves to propagate the existing fears. Our support staff works extremely hard investigating collusion complaints and dealing with the integrity of our site. A lot of that work is undone with an accusation of this nature.

Please understand that accusing a player of cheating at a poker table is extremely serious and should never be done. If you have concerns regarding the play of two or more individuals, we encourage you to notify us immediately so that we can investigate. Include as many details as possible including their player IDs and where they are playing.

As you can see, we have a lot of tools at our disposal which help us keep our games honest and fair. In addition, the thousands of honest, vigilant players who point out situations that merit investigation are an important part of our arsenal. Thank you for doing your part to protect the integrity of our games.

Well, that's me told.

But I have to admit I had never thought about this in so much depth. Kudos to PokerStars, it's a good point well made.

Even if it is a cut-and-pasted standard response, it's a damn good one and I wanted to share it.

I don't use Moneybookers very often, but I have an account there for the odd times I need to receive money that way.

This was one of those times.  I was sent a sum of money, originally in British Pounds but it got converted to US Dollars as that's the currency on my account.  It landed in my balance as $96.20.

Then I went to withdraw it.  As I hadn't really taken any notice of the actual amount in dollars so far, I just agreed to everything - including a $2.50 withdrawal fee.  It said I could withdraw up to $93.69 and I asked for the lot.

Did you spot it?  $96.20 minus $2.50 cannot result in a number that ends with a 9.  There's a penny missing somewhere, and I almost wan't paying enough attention to notice.

Thankfully, it showed me a handy statement afterwards:

Great, everything balances in the end.  They just made a penny disappear to compensate for the error.

$2.51 minus $2.50 is zero.  Apparently.

I don't think there can be anything more embarrasing for a wannabe bank than not being able to add or subtract two amounts of money.  Perhaps that's why their software has this error correction built in: "If something goes wrong, we'll just pretend that it didn't and hope nobody notices".

Guess what.  I noticed.

The penny is insignificant, especially when the amount of money we're talking about has already been converted to once and will be converted again to end up back in a GBP bank account.  When that happens, you have to expect to be hit by an unfavourable exchange rate and that they'll skim off fractions of a penny at every possible opportunity.

But that's not what's happened here.  The statement simply does not add up - it is blatently wrong.

We're not talking about a dodgy online casino that only has to pay a sum of money to a random island nation in order to call itself licensed.  This is a financial institution regulated by the FSA in the UK, and it's very worrying that such an organisation could make any sum of money vanish without an audit trail.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's not hard to make sure that your software handles decimal numbers correctly.  And, yes, I am available for consultancy work.

Let's see what they say...

I just had this offer in an email from Party Poker.

Wow, a $975 bonus.  It's a random amount, but it's huge.  How can I resist?

5,850 Party Points sounds like a fair chunk, but to be honest it's so long since I played there I couldn't even remember how you earn them.

Playing tournaments, you earn 2 Party Points for every $1 paid in fees.  You pay $2,925 and get back $975, so it's equivalent to getting precisely one-third of your fees back.

Not a bad deal.  But do you remember the last time you paid three grand in tournament fees in a month?  Me neither.

Admittedly, I rarely play much higher than the $20s, so I'd be looking at around 70 sit-and-gos a day for 21 days to unlock this bonus.  That's a full time job - assuming you can play a dozen at a time, and I can't.

It's more achievable for high stakes SNG players.  The $100s have a $9 fee and Party have capped it $10 per tournament for higher buy-ins, right up to the $5,000 tournaments.  It would take 325 $100 tournaments or 293 at any higher level to get there.

That's roughly 15 per day, which is still high for a casual player, but it's more realistic.  However I can't help thinking that if you can play that many of high stakes tournaments, you're serious enough about poker to already have a rakeback at least as good as this elsewhere and that you wouldn't want to jeopardise your VIP status by taking a few weeks out for this bonus, when you'd get almost no perks from Party after the bonus is over.

So... if it's going to happen, it'll have to be cash games.  A few years ago when Party Poker bonuses were just great, I used to clear them playing $1/$2 limit, which meant relatively soft games with fairly low variance, and the numbers meant that Party was actually giving away more in bonuses than you paid in rake.  It was awesome.

Now, things have tightened up.  At this level, it takes 57 raked hands to earn 10 Party Points, so for this promotion, you'd need to play 33,345 raked hands!

From my past experience, it takes about 5 hours four-tabling $1/$2 to play 1,000 raked hands, for which you'd pay about $55 in rake.  It's possible, but it's a lot of work.  In fact, it's a full time job again, about 7 hours of solid play - that's one-third of the 21 days you have to complete the play requirement.

For what it's worth, the rake you'd pay is about $1800 so the $975 bonus is equivalent to a little over 50% rakeback.  Not bad at all.

The number of hands that are raked increases slightly as you move up limits, but that's not as significant as the amount of rake you pay.  That's why at $3/$6 you only need 14 raked hands to earn 10 Party Points.  That brings down the total number of raked hands required to 8,190 - or about 40 hours of play four-tabling.

It's a pretty attractive bonus, but it's also pretty inaccessible to the majority of players and I guess that's the point.  They're trying to deter the small-timers and serial bonus whores and get players who are prepared to commit a big chunk of time to Party Poker, then hope they stick around afterwards.

I'd love to be able to find a way to do exactly what they don't want, but as I only have a week left before I head off to Vegas, I just can't see it happening...

I had a heads up on this as I saw the results page yesterday, but this email just in confirms it.  My Poker Stars monkey photo won a prize!

Hello Christopher,

We have awarded 5,000 FPPs for your PokerStars Monkey Photo. Thank you for playing on PokerStars.

http://www.pokerstars.com/vip/store/promotions/monkey/

Regards,

Scotty
PokerStars VIP Team

The winning picture is excellent, but to be honest this one is my favourite:

What I wasn't expecting was another email that arrived at exactly the same time announcing I had been upgraded to Silver Star status (I didn't play enough last month and fell out of the VIP tier).  No idea how it works, and it's not really that big a deal because Poker Stars are literally giving away VIP status this month, but it was a nice surprise.

5,000 FPPs would put me at Platinum Star, but they've weren't added as status points (understandable, because I didn't earn them) so it must have been a manual adjustment; either a 1-tier upgrade for winners or just "here, have Silver Star so you can spend your points on something other than another monkey".

Anyway, as the photos I entered into the competition of monkey in Vegas were (ahem) creatively enhanced, here's one I actually took last month, straight out of the camera.

This player's screen name might be "italian62", but the poker software shows his location as Amsterdam, and he definitely talks trash in Dutch.

Most of his comments up to this point in the game had been along the lines of "pfffffffft" or other such language-neutral noises, and at times it was just a string of random characters - presumably caused by banging his fists on the keyboard in rage.

He was pretty tilty.

The little "holding hands" icon shows that he'd made my buddy list.  In fact, by playing more than 50% of hands I'd been datamining, he'd actually made the list before I sat next to him.

I won two hands back-to-back before this outburst:

1. He limped in and I raised with JJ.  He called and then immediately folded, first to act on an ace-high flop.  He was obviously more scared of the ace than I was.

2. He limped, I raised with AQ and he called.  We both caught a pair on a Q72 flop and he called down with 87 when I bet on every street.  Hardly spectacular.

Then, he made actual words: "Kanker donut".

According to Babel Fish, it means "cancer donut".  However that's a very literal translation which really doesn't convey the subtle idiom of the insult.

Is he telling me he wishes I would get cancer?  Is he likening me to a horrible disease?  Or am I completely missing the point?

If I could ascertain this, I think I could have a pretty good guess at what his next insult (sadly, not aimed at me) meant: "Kankerhomo".

Smoke and a pancake?

Here are some of the photos Claire and I submitted for the PokerStars "Monkey Madness" promotion, and some others that didn't make the cut., from our trips to London and Salzburg earlier in the year.

Monkey at Buck House:

The weather was just grim the whole time we were there, which makes the photo a bit dismal really.  This was the best of a gloomy bunch.

If the sky looks crap, crop it tight to avoid the sky.  Fine in theory.  But in this one, somehow we managed to completely miss two girls with their heads up a statue's arse. 

Monkey at the foot of Nelson's Column:

I really like this angle, but the picture could benefit from just the slightest hint of colour in the horrible English sky.  It's one of the reasons I'm finally learning to use Photoshop...

Monkey at Thorpe Park:

I thought we'd have big fun taking him on some coasters.  Two problems though: not only the shitty weather (surprise) but also half the park was closed, so this was actually the only photo op we got.

Monkey in Salzburg:

Nothing says Salzburg like a statue of Mozart.  In fact the whole town is nothing but Mozart Street, Mozart Museum, Wolfgang's Bar and Grill, the Amadeus toothpaste factory, etc.

The only other famous thing associated with Salzburg is The Sound Of Music.  So why on earth wouldn't there be a painted lifesize cow to celebrate this?

Of course, I would have taken some photos of Monkey in Las Vegas if the competition had allowed for it.  Unfortunately, the closing date was this Wednesday, so the timing was just slightly wrong.

However I did use a little trickery to try to create some "Monkey <3 Vegas" shots.  I'll set those to post on here tomorrow while I'm on a plane, and then try to take the real thing next week.

I'm actually packed now too.  So is monkey.  Vegas here we come!

A couple of days ago I was kicked off the iPoker network while playing on two tables.  I knew it wasn't a problem with my internet because I was still connected to PokerStars at the time, and carried on playing without incident.

A similar thing had happened earlier the same day, when I wasn't playing at the time, just datamining.  However the second time I had (carefully chosen) seats on two tables and by the time I reconnected (which took less than 30 seconds) I'd been booted and someone else was sitting to the left of my good buddies, SirFishio and McDonkalot.

This happening twice so close together seemed a bit weird.  I didn't expect anything to come of it, but I wrote to support on the offchance that they could use the information to help find a problem, which I suspected was coming from the network itself.

The result, basically, is that I think they tipped me.

Chris, please be informed that it been determined that you were in fact
disconnected from the table "Hastinapur" (1509348483) as a result of temporary connection problems with the card room.  As a result, a refund of $1.50 will be credited to your poker account shortly.

I didn't expect any compensation.  As far as I know, I didn't lose anything through being timed out.  I wasn't involved in a hand and I'm pretty sure from the hand histories that survived that I'd not posted a blind recently.  So I missed out on playing a few free hands, out of position, and even if I could put a value on this, it wouldn't be much.

So, a buck fifty?  Kinda random, but thanks I guess.

They went on:

However, your connection problem from the "Agartala" (509182411) was not due to any connection problems on the side of the card room.

So while they acknowledged that one was a connection problem with the card room, the other one - at exactly the same time - apparently was not.  Riiiiiiiiiight.

This makes my head hurt, but I guess I'm $1.50 up on the deal...

It's apparently over a year since my last royal flush.  I broke that dry spell last night.

Royals are always pretty, but even more so when you get there against an otherwise identical hand.

We both flopped a broadway straight and we capped the flop.  He led the turn and just called my raise, and I was delighted that he decided to pay off my river bet after I made The Best Hand In Poker with four to a flush on board.

It's not quite as long since I last had quads, but they have never looked prettier than when I managed to hit that last remaining card in the deck to win a massive pot.

$56 is massive for $1/$2.  He'd raised pre-flop and I called from the small blind with a couple of other players involved.  I put in 4 small bets on the flop when I was behind, then won 4 big bets on the turn and 4 more on the river after I sucked out.

It's the first time for literaly years that I can remember hating the four-bet cap in online poker.  Even with a possible flush out there, I'm sure this one was going to the felt if only they'd have let us!

In a marketing email randomly signed by Daniel Negreanu, PokerStars have announced that you now don't have to be quite as important to become a VIP.

It seems to be great news for the player.  Instead of having to earn 1,500 player points in a month to be crowned SilverStar, you only need 1,200.  The price of GoldStar has also been slashed from 4,000 monthly FPPs to 3,000, and PlatinumStar from 10,00 FPPs to 7,500.

So what's it actually worth?

If you currently have no VIP status with PokerStars (they call it BronzeStar, but it means NoStar) then by reaching the SilverStar level 300 points sooner you can use the 1.5x multiplier on points 1,200 to 1,499 this month.  That's a potential 150 more points than you would have got last month, and in real money (1 FPP = 1.6c) it's worth $2.40.

Then because you reach GoldStar 1,000 points sooner than before, you'll be earning 2x on points 3,000 to 3,999 instead of 1.5x.  Get over 4000 points this month and get 500 FPPs more than you would have done last month.  That's another $8.

Shoot for PlatinumStar and you will be earning a 2.5x bonus on points 7,500 to 9,999 instead of 2x.  That's 1,250 more FPPs than previously, worth $20.

The revised point thresholds are only a quantifiable perk if you are moving up a level in any given month.  There's a little value in being able to retain your status by playing less poker, but how much that's worth all depends on how much you play the following month.

Not really worth getting excited about then.

Remember the last time you saw six hands all go to showdown?

Me neither.

Sure, three of them ended up all in, but this was still a whopping $100 pot at $2/$4 limit hold'em. Enjoy!

Deoghar 2/4, hand converted by the iPoker Converter at Talking-Poker

Preflop: Hero is in the BB with T K
UTG moves all-in for $4, 1 fold, MP calls $4, 2 folds, CO-1 calls $4, CO calls $4, Button calls $4, SB folds, Hero calls $2.

There aren't many hands I fold for 11-1 immediate pot odds, in fact there's probably none.  I'm certainly going to see a flop with king-ten.

Flop ($25) 5 J Q
Hero checks, MP checks, CO-1 bets $2, CO moves all-in for $4, Button raises to $6, Hero calls $6, MP raises to $8, CO-1 calls $6, Button calls $2, Hero calls $2.

Up and indeed down.  Calling 3 bets cold on a draw?  Well, it's currently a $6 call to win $37, with the possibility of other callers to sweeten the deal.  Or if it gets capped (as it did) I'm paying $8 to have a shot at $47 or more.  The worst case is that I get about 6-1 on a draw that is better than 5-1 to make the nuts on the next card.

Turn ($61) 2
Hero checks, MP bets $4, CO-1 moves all-in for $3, Button raises to $8, Hero calls $8, MP calls $4.

The two players who still have money left could cap it again with me stuck in the middle, and the card was a complete brick so that's fairly likely given the flop action.  However I'm still drawing to the nuts.  My outs are discounted slightly for Ah and 9h making a possible flush, but that's unlikely to help the two villians left in the main pot.

If MP just calls here, I'm getting 11-1 on the call ($8 to win $88); if it goes to 3 bets it's 7-1 ($12 to win $96) and even if they cap it then 5.5-1 ($16 for a shot at $104) is still worth hanging around for.

River ($88) K
Hero checks, MP bets $4, Button calls $4, Hero calls $4

I'm almost certaily beaten, but I did just hit top pair so I'm not letting it go for one bet.  My hand has to be good just 5% of the time for this is a profitable call, which I'll admit is still a bit of a stretch, but the downside of tilting after seeing I folded the best hand in a $100 pot would be far worse!

UTG shows T Q
MP shows J J
CO-1 shows J A
CO shows A 4
Button shows 5 5
Hero shows T K

MP wins $100 with Three of a kind, Jacks.

This is really only marginally interesting, even to geeks like me, but it grabbed my attention for a few minutes.

PokerStars are approaching their 25 billionth poker hand, and promotions abound.

This includes a 25% deposit bonus up to $250 maximum which sounds great, until you realise the daily deposit limit on almost every payment method is $600.

I already emailed support and got my limits increased just for this, which was pretty easy but it took a few hours to get it cleared so if you're planning on maxing out this bonus don't leave it until the last minute.

Every million hands leading up to #250,000,000,000 some fireworks will go off and the table that's dealt a hand number ending in six or more zeros will have some free money thrown their way.  Expect to see more 1c/2c tables running than you ever thought possible as the big one approaches.

Anyway, I noticed something funny was going on in the lobby this evening as they began streaming a live update of how long until the next hand, and who got lucky in the last one.

Turns out you needed to restart the client and download an update for this to work properly, otherwise it scrolls through this code, which I've crudely pasted together:

After the update, this is what you see:

Unless the milestone hand is actually in progress, in which case the message is slightly different.

So what do we learn from this about the the PokerStars software?  Not much, only that the scrolling text area in the lobby is not just displaying a fixed message pushed down from the server - it's actually capable of some rudimentary program logic.  Why?  I don't really know.

And we can see that inside the brain of the operation they actually refer to every billionth hand not as a "milestone" but as a "jubilee".

As I said, marginally interesting at best.