stevesbets

Wow.

60 minutes considering absolute poker story

Nat just alerted me to this on AIM. This could easily be terrible for online poker.

For now I’m done wandering around Copenhagen and London and I’m back home in Philly. I had fun in Europe, but as the old saying goes, “it’s great to travel but it’s even better to come home.” Since arriving back I have had a Business school interview, attended my grandmother’s 21st birthday party (figure that one out) and I have been working on an article for BLUFF magazine. I can’t share the content of my article here but I assure you that it is both poker related and worth checking out (a paradoxical statement much of the time) so pick up the next issue of BLUFF.

Poker forums are a funny thing. The major ones (twoplustwo, pocketfives) have always seemed to me like a sort of grotesque online fraternity filled with 17 year olds. Usually about 2% of the posts offer some sort of interesting thought or insight while the other 98% are pointless one liners such as “lol”,  a repeat of someone elses line, some idiotic forum jargon with no relation the post it is supposedly in response to such as [x] AKo FTW IMO (ace king offsuit for the win in my opinion), or some scathing criticism of anyone and everyone. Of the 2% of posts that are decent, probably 95% of them come from well known respected “posters” most of whom are online pros. There is definitely something valuable in being one of these respected posters. They build solid reputations and become well liked among all the teenage fan boys. On the more practical side, someone like Taylor Caby was able to parlay his forum popularity into a powerhouse poker training website. From a business perspective I regret avoiding forums for most of my career (evidenced by my post count of 24 on 2p2 under my name TGSB).

I always told myself that I had good reason for refusing to take part in the mountain of idiocy, but I have come to realize that due to the backwards way the world works, it’s sometimes necessary to do pointless things. Exhibit A in this case would be the phenomenon of post count. My friend shrew posts on 2p2 all the time. He NEVER offers any sort of insight and almost always just repeats someone or says lol. Despite this, my guess is most people would give something he posts far more credence than something I posted simply because his post count is four figures vs my two figures. My friends and I joke that all it would take to scam millions from the poker economy is to join a forum, make like 10000 posts about ANYTHING, and suddenly you would be the most trusted person in the world. Even writing about the respect that a figure like post count brings to people makes me a little bit angry at how backwards our society is. I’d imagine that in many walks of life the one listened to the most is simply the one who speaks the most; This is totally unacceptable to me. Now that I have ranted about forums, I would highly recommend everyone read through this thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=147782

The original poster in that thread, stealthmunk, is a 19 year old degenerate who I have played against in long high stakes no limit sessions on many occasions. Given the crazy prop bet he made, my guess is our life philosophies are very different even if our love of gambling is not.

NOTE: In the second to last sentence I almost wrote “played with” instead of “played against” funny that while they are virtually synonyms in this context the latter far better represents the reality of the situation

I have never told anyone the specifics of the story I’m about to write, I don’t know why I am putting it now in a public domain, but here it goes.

Three years ago yesterday I woke up in my dorm room shrugged off sleep and went to play the Saturday online poker tournaments on partypoker and pokerstars. My girlfriend was at dance practice for the day so I intended to play poker most of the day straight through to dinner time. My mom interrupted me with a phone call asking what I was doing. The conversation was fairly standard, but there was an edge in her voice and I sensed there was something just a little bit off, she asked questions she doesn’t normally ask and eventually wished me a good day and hung up. Awhile later she called back and acted VERY strangely before hanging up and I began to get nervous. I called my dad’s office to try and gather what was going on and became nervous when it went to voicemail only to be momentarily relieved minutes later when I remembered that it was Saturday. I called my dad’s cell phone and it rang a few times before being answered, but no voice came on to the other end. After about 10 seconds I faintly heard my mom’s voice in the background and the phone clicked off.

A few minutes later, I was still in two partypoker 1k single table tournaments when my world collapsed. and I got through to my mom again, in a fairly normal tone she said, “Steven, is Jon or Bree or anyone else around?” When I said no and told her she was making me nervous she suddenly broke into tears and said, “Your dad died this morning of a heart…”

I have no memory of the rest of her words or the conversation, I just started screaming. As the walls collapsed in on me I felt like there was a chance I was in a dream or some sort of alternate unreal reality and tried to gather myself to figure out what was happening. A few minutes later is my first memory and I realized that as I was screaming at the top of my lungs I was still playing the partypoker 1k sit and goes going all in every hand. To this day I have no idea why I was still playing or why I did what came next, but someone in the chat was making fun of my play (I think I was going all in every hand) and I declared to the table, “My father just died”. People at the table made some sort of remarks only one of which I remember, “If that’s true why are you still playing”. Its amazing what happens when you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing and can’t comprehend how everything you know has suddenly changed. When the other player said this and it came to me that quitting was an option, I dropped the mouse and my GA heard my screaming and came to see what was going on. Somehow over the next couple hours I ended up in my sister’s room at Penn, then my house in the suburbs.

Flash forward three years. By way of pure chance, I I found myself in a religious institution on Feb 26 yesterday for probably the first time since my father’s funeral. Luke and I were visiting St Paul’s Cathedral and resting after walking up and down all the steps when a priest came to the pulpit and recited a prayer of some sort. Afterwards he said something like, “I’ll be around all day if anyone wants to talk to me about anything”. My aversion to organized religion is fairly well known, but for a very brief moment I even considered going to talk to him just to see what he might say about my story. In that brief moment I understood why many people resort to faith without science nor proof, because perhaps something so terrible happened that there is no other way they can understand it or make it dissipate in their heads. Being unable to change who I am though, and being unsure I would want to anyway, Luke and I finished our visit to St Paul’s and left without another religious word.

Through circumstance I haven’t been with my family for the last two “anniversary’s” of February 26 but I can’t say I fully regret that. Some days aren’t worth remembering.

I have now been in London approximately 24 hours , and i have seen many of the “important” touristy sites. Last afternoon we went by the tower of london and London Bridge until the pouring started and we headed back to the hotel. For dinner we went to Lester Square which was an area I was very impressed with. Lit up like Vegas and bustling like Manhattan, it was a vibrant place to hang out even on a Sunday night.

This morning we went by Buckingham Palace to witness the changing of the guard. We agreed that the white house needs a dog and pony show of that magnitude. Even though it was a random Monday morning, the crowd was insane to watch some soldiers march around. The USA could make a fortune to finance their government spending.

Next was Westminster Abbey which was awe inspiring, when I depart life I want to go with a sculpture of me on top of my tomb like the people laid to rest in Westminster. I was disappointed that they didn’t allow photos inside of the church. I don’t have a really strong understanding of anything holy.

After the Abbey Luke and I were walking along the Thames looking over at the eye of London (which looks like a giant Ferris Wheel).  I noted that the wall was very low on the bridge we were traversing and we joked about how much we would need to be paid to jump into the river. Luke mentioned that there would be a good chance of survival as opposed to leaping off the golden gate bridge. He went on to tell me some interesting tales of the suicide culture of the golden gate bridge. Over 1000 people have jumped from it. As the number approached 1000, a local radio station set up shop on the bridge to track the count to 1000 suicides, announcing what the number was up to over the airwaves. They apparently even offered a reward of like 10 cases of beer to the family of the 1000th jumper. I was pretty shocked that such indifference could be shown to all of these deaths. About 3 or 4 of the jumpers survived due to hitting the water in just the right way. When interviewed after the fact, to a man they said that the instant they jumped they immediately regretted the decision. This is a fairly notable phenomenon. These people were so depressed that they chose to end their life AND actually followed through with it, but as soon as the decision was irreversible they changed their mind. This as is close as we can get to talking with the dead. Let that be a lesson to any of you contemplating suicide out there.

A few other notable observations about London.  Everything is obviously insanely expensive right down to daily internet access at the hotel which is 15 pounds (30 dollars roughly). Online poker is advertised all over the place including on subways and on billboards. The USA really needs to open its doors to online poker advertising, lets put a big full tilt logo in place of the cup o noodles in time square so we could watch online poker blow up to never before seen heights. One thing I forgot to mention about EPT Copenhagen was that there was an insanely large media presence there. I would say there was roughly 4 times the media there than at a standard WPT stop, the Euros just love poker. Back to London, it reminds me of New York City and I really like that, tons to do and eat, but then the added perk of legalized casino gambling and sportsbetting (though I haven’t placed a bet yet). The abundant William Hill sports betting parlors are in stark contrast to USA’s absurd stand on everything gambling related. We have yet to figure out if the rake here is as exorbitant as the rake in the Danish poker games.  Overall I really like this city, I could definitely live here and I can’t say that about most places.

I’ve been in Denmark for a few days so far and there are a few things I figure are worthy of remark. Firstly, both Copenhagen and London are obscenely expensive. They are both above new york city on the list of most expensive cities worldwide, combine that with the dollar being totally tanked and prices are more outrageous than most people can imagine. A few examples(i know those who read my blog are mathematically gifted so i’ll let you do the conversions, 1 pound is about 2 dollars, and 1 dollar is about 5 Kroners): in the London airport I got a burger, fries and garlic bread for the low price of 25 pounds. My friend and I went to lunch in Copenhagen yesterday at a small italian place where we split a small pizza and each got a small appetizer for the very reasonable price of 368 Kroners. Dominos pizza delivers to our hotel room for the price of 125 Kroners per medium pizza. Last but not least, a 5 minute cab ride will clock in at 100 Kroners.

On the subject of cabs, nearly every cab that we’ve seen so far is a mercedes benz, not like an old trashy one either, brand new, detailed benz’s. When I asked the cab driver last night how they all have mercedes’ he smiled and said, “we like mercedes”

On the gambling front, I busted towards the end of day 1 of the EPT event. They started us with 10,000 chips as opposed to the current WPT trend of starting with 20 or 30k chips so the structure moved the tournament along pretty fast. There were two day 1s with 230 people each, when I busted there was about 95 people left in my day1. So i made it kind of far but it was all for naught as a pretty sick turn card crushed my EPT dreams.

Casino Copenhagen in our hotel is tauted as the biggest and greatest hotel in all of Northern Europe. It is very very different from any casino i can imagine in the USA. Men are required to wear jackets, there is and 85 Kroner entry fee for the privilege of gambling, there are no free drinks, they are open only from 2pm to 4am. At 3pm yesterday there were a total of 4 tables open in the whole casino, 2 blackjack and 2 roulette. In the blackjack games they have just about every rule possible to hurt the player, and a tiny max bet of 2000 Kroners. Additionally, it is expected for players to tip 10% of their original bet anytime they get blackjack and they tell you so on the signs by the blackjack games. The poker games they spread are no less ridiculous. Since it is tournament time they are spreading games like 25 50 nl/plo (all games are in Kroners), 50 100 nlh and 50 100 plo. The rake on these games is 5% per pot with a max of a whopping 150 Kroners per pot!! Needless to say, if there were an aggressive, wild 9 handed plo game at the 25 50 level, the house would probably have most of the money after 12 hours of play.

The city of Copenhagen sort of looks like a fairy tale with colorful interesting buildings, twisty towers and old churches. It is dreary and cold every day at this time of year but apparently the summer sports a sun that is up until 11pm every day and parties around the clock. Luke and I had a blackjack dealer yesterday who looked exactly like Miranda from Sex and the City and we inquired about the prices of apartments in the swanky area of town near the Queens house (we witnessed the changing of the guard). She said that a 1000 sq foot apartment may run between 20 and 30k Kroners. More expensive than Manhattan! They call diet coke coca cola light, and they use coke zero as an equal substitute for it. Every 7 11 is well stocked with all sorts of pastries, many of which are unrecognizable to my American eye.

I converted some Dollars into Kroners at the train station yesterday and the clerk warned me to beware of pick pockets as she dispensed the money. I felt no need to beware since I feel far safer here than in most cities in the US. As my friend Luke put it, “In America you may be killed for your air jordans, that just doesn’t happen here”

Today we’re going across the bridge to Sweden to check out Malmo,  seeing the twisted tower designed by Calatrava interests us. Maybe I can dream that one day I’ll have the 30 million required to buy one of the cubes in the new building he’s designing in Manhattan. That’s all for now, I’ll give more updates later.

I’m sitting at a bar in the Newark NJ airport waiting for my plane to depart for londons heathrow airport.This woman just tried to walk with a drink out of the bar and the bartender told her that she had to stay inside with the glass, she gave the bartender a nasty eye roll. Why the meanness for just doing her job?

I’m getting to Copenhagen in a roundabout way, flying virgin atlantic to London at which point I have 5 hours to get my bags, change terminals to british airways, and check in for my flight from London to Copenhagen. On the way back I’ll spend a few days in London, hopefully with cash in my pocket if the tournament goes well.  My friend Luke (Lukekim.blogspot.com) is flying from Vegas to join me for this trip so props to him for coming along. If anyone is going to be in Copenhagen or London drop me a line, also if you have any good ideas for things to do in either place let me know.

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails lately and I’m sorry for being unable to respond to the questions, I’ve been really busy. One person asked said that there were too many terrible players for him to beat the low stakes sngs. As I havent played them for awhile I don’t really know how tough they are, but my guess is too many bad players cant really be a bad thing. This is one of the many dumb/weird things that especially live poker players do, they talk like people are terrible then they say they don’t want to play with them. For example, I was playing 2 5 nl with some friends at the borgata a few weeks ago, when i play that low, i sometimes play pretty loose and terrible. My friend with me plays far worse than me. More than one of the “regulars” made some absurd offhand comment about how the players at this table were too loose and terrible for them, and they needed a table change. Several others left. I honestly dont understand how people so illogical can live in the world and get by. I mean, I sometimes have trouble ordering pizza, and yet people with so little thought are capable of living rich full lives. Note that I’m not making fun of casual players that choose not to devote much time to understanding poker, the players I speak of are borgata REGULARS that utter those sentiments.

I just read a book called Moneyball which profoundly interested me. I have a big blog coming up with my thoughts on it when I get the time, but for now, anyone that can get their hands no this book should read it, even if you don’t like baseball.  Anyway, my laptop is dying so I’m gonna start one of my books. Everybody start reading Moneyball now!

The very best cardplayer I know is also the worst poker player I know. He consistently displays above the rim thinking, sharp wit, and great holdem hand reading skills. With that said, He is a consistent and large lifetime $ loser at poker. Aside from the obvious lack of discipline that someone who fits this description must display, he has the biggest tilt problem of anybody I have ever seen. He admits that when he is tilting he is awful. What he doesn’t admit is that I would venture to guess he is on tilt for 99.9% of the hands he has ever played. For nearly every other human on earth this would be absurd hyperbole, but for this young man it is fact. I’m convinced that the ONLY hands he plays not on tilt are the ones he folds immediately after winning a big pot. After one fold though the inner tilt builds up and his “normal” tilted play resumes. To me he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it takes more than innate card sense and intelligence to win at this game.

Over the last couple years I have twice had small debts that I allegedly owed sent to collection agencies. While both were more or less the company’s fault and not my own, the way the two companies handled their respective situaitons once I contacted them to me proves the difference between a good company, and a terrible company. In general, the system of collections is really outrageous, I believe consumers need some recourse.

The first story begins two years ago when I lived at The Left Bank apartment building in Philadelphia. When my roommates and I moved into our apartment, it was totally empty save a cable box from Viking communications that the previous tenants had used. Representatives from our apartment building came in our first day in the apartment to take it out. We wanted to get Comcast cable but the building had some sort of deal that gave Viking, a company no one had heard of, a monopoly on cable and internet access. In order to get our viking cable box we simply needed to go down to our lobby to pick up the box from our leasing office, to me this made it seem as if the Left Bank was an alter-ego of Viking Communications. Throughout our days at the Left Bank, Viking proved to be one of the most horrendously run companies that I have ever come across. Their customer service number consisted of an answering machine. A human could only be reached if there were over 10 complaints lodged on the machine by different people in the same day, the internet went down all the time proving very costly to me, and they did not even offer cable packages that included HD or DVR. When our time at Left Bank was up in June of 2006, I paid the final cable bill and canceled service. We moved out and left our cable box in our apartment to be scooped up by left bank representatives.

I thought I was done with the situation until the fall of 06 when I first received a call from a collection agency. It was an automated message on my voice mail informing me that I owed a debt and giving me a number to call.  A very rude and angry old lady on the other end informed me that I owed 256 dollars to Viking Communications. She could not offer me any hint of what the bill was for, but informed me that until her company was paid they would be calling me every day multiple times per day, as well as sending debt collection letters to my home. Frustrated, I tried calling Viking, forgetting that they have no customer service outside of a machine. As the absurd debt collection calls continued, and with no way of finding out exactly why they believed I owed them money, I decided to call the building manager at Left Bank. He told me that he would call his “contact” at Viking and let me know. The next day he called me to inform me that I owed them for my cable and internet bills from August and September of 2006. (Note that this was over a month after I moved out making it impossible that it was even some sort of glitch with canceling my account, since if it were I would have “owed” for July of 2006).

After 5-6 phone calls back and forth I finally got a hold of a Viking representative who told me that the burden was on ME to PROVE that I didn’t live in the Left Bank during those months and therefore it was impossible that I had the service with them. I faxed them documents that proved my left bank rental time period and my new apartment rental and they agreed the matter was resolved. Sure enough though, a week later another call from collections claiming I owed Viking 151 dollars. I go through the same deal as before to finally get through to a Viking agent. She informed me in the sassiest way possible that I never returned the cable box to the leasing office of Left Bank and therefore owed the money. (They had never said a word about this before while claiming I owed them for August and September).

To make a very long story short, I was assured over and over again by Viking that they would stop coming after me for these fraudulent debts, and over and over again the collections company harassed me the next day and every day. It took over 10 months for them to finally stop calling me. There was a total disconnect between Viking and the collections agency, and the collections agency doesn’t care one bit about rightness or fairness, they only care about annoying the hell out of whoever they believe MIGHT owe them money.

So these two entities were able to take up my time for over 10 months and as a consumer I have virtually no recourse. Even retelling this story now infuriates me to the point where I want to walk over to Left Bank and tell no one to live there because they have to deal with the scummiest company around.  Maybe some sort of company should be created to constantly harass and bother the officers of a company that harasses consumers with fraudulent charges.

This blog tilt has turned pretty long so I’ll save the next story about collections for later.

My buddy Luke (http://lukekim.blogspot.com) has recently had quite an ordeal with UB which  he wrote up on his blog. I of course think it’s outrageous how they evaded his emails, calls and questions, but you can read his blog and draw your own conclusions. I think it is insane that one of the mega poker companies out there (absolute poker/ultimatebet) are as shady as they are. They avoid answering emails, they have no phone number that average players can use to contact them, and give players no recourse when they decide to confiscate funds for shady reasons. It is pretty much beyond me how someone can play regularly on these sites as opposed to more reputable sites like pokerstars and full tilt.

I recently had tried to log into UB for the first time in years and I discovered that my account was banned for unspecified “scamming”. Additionally, two of my good friends’ accounts were banned for being associated with my account. Needless to say, I hadn’t touched the account in years and I have never been involved with fraud or scamming of any sort. All three of us tried emailing UB. They responded to one of my friends offering a phone number he could call to clear up the issue. The phone number was out of service. How can a site that makes more money than most of us could ever dream of offer up a customer service number that is inoperable. After a couple weeks of run around, I got my friend Nat involved, and since he has connections with the higher ups he was able to clear it up and get our accounts clear. Without Nat I think it is safe to say that we would have never been able to fix the issue due to UB’s policy of either ignoring emails or offering up unhelpful responses.

Thinking about the issues that Luke and I have had with Ultimatebet gets me angry at the fact that some well known and allegedly reputable people are spokespeople for this site as well as absolute. I think the “celebrity” faces of Ultimatebet (Phil Hellmuth, Antonio Esfandiari, Annie Duke and many others), Absolutepoker (Mark Seif) and other large sites need to be held responsible for the outrageous business practices of the sites they represent.  I know I personally could never be the face of a site that steals, scams and generally offers a poor experience to players and if I ever do get offered a deal from a site, I would be personally willing to attempt to rectify any legitimate issues that players have.

Mark Seif in particular did something even more outrageous in the face of the now infamous potripper superuser scandal. This player was an Absolute insider who won a tournament, his play made it blatantly obvious to everyone that he was able to see everyone’s hole cards. It was fortunate that the mastermind behind this scam did not have a masterful mind because otherwise he could have stolen money for years and never been caught. However, just before this scandal was officially proven, Mark Seif made a video in which he stated that he watched the video of the tournament and saw no proof or even strong evidence that the player could see the other hole cards. His statement was certainly disingenuous, he compromised his integrity for the money Absolute threw at him.

I have met Mark and outside of a bit of a temper, he seemed to be a good guy, and he is certainly a well known member of the poker tournament circuit. It amazes me that he can both go out in public and look at himself in the mirror after making those absurd statements. If online poker is to survive and thrive, the celebrity spokespeople need to have honor that is beyond reproach. Additionally they need to hold the sites they work for accountable for terrible service or worse. After hearing what Mark Seif said, I would never trust him again and I hope other players also do not.

On a personal note, if it isn’t clear here I have trouble containing my outrage at these sites and their spokesmen. I love online poker and it is under attack by our country and by lots of live poker players who claim they don’t trust it. I would argue tirelessly in it’s defense but it becomes impossible when those in power are unethical or downright criminal. The poker community needs to be less forgiving and truly make it impossible for those who lie, cheat or steal to be around the big tournaments without constant complaints, questions, and harsh criticism.

As I walked home from lunch today I heard basically the only question I ever hear when I’m walking down the street by a random person, “do you have any spare change”. As is my custom, I walked by without saying much, maybe i muttered a “sorry, no”. I have one friend who routinely gave whatever change he had to beggars on the street. The reason he cited was, “it means more to them than it does to me”. Obviously if you extend this reasoning to every situation where someone who needs something more than him wants something he will end up in bad shape, but in the micro sense I suppose its noble. I am often moved to give a little bit to these sad cases, but anytime I am close I remind myself of the bigger picture.

Giving money in this form encourages bothering people on the street, and even acting belligerant if they refuse to give change. The plethora of beggars is a bad problem in Philadelphia and I’d imagine many other parts of the country. Aside from lowering the value of all the real estate and businesses in the city, they make some people feel unsafe walking around at night and sometimes refuse to go out. On a more personal level, they condition everyone to be less friendly and sociable with everyone else in the world. If ANYONE approaches you on the street, aren’t you most likely to just ignore them and walk right by? This is the opposite of the natural human inclination to be social beings. These social desires are made clear by the massive popularity of networking sites like facebook and myspace. I fully realize I’m not stating any good solution to the homelessness issue, I’m just giving my own philosophy for not giving money.

On the weird things that happen after dark subject, my friend and I went to a diner last night at like 2 am.  On our way home we saw a cab driving down the street with its back door wide open. The driver seemed to be aware of it, but was too lazy to get out and close it, he was seemingly indifferent to the possibility of the door hitting something and causing danger to himself or others. We also saw someone peeing off the chestnut street bridge into the river. He honestly cant find a better place? What is wrong with people?

Borgata tourney report still to come