Bigger Deal

I’ve just finished reading a great book called The Power of the Dog. It’s a novel about CIA activities in central America, and it contains as neat a summing up of US foreign policy as I’ve ever heard: "What we lack in subtlety, we make up for in lack of subtlety." That line struck a [...]

Soundtrack: "For What It’s Worth" by Buffalo Springfield. Paranoia strikes deep Into your heart it will creep It starts when you’re always afraid… My Bigger Deal colleague, Richard Whitehouse, his heart in his mouth, writes that the Sky is Falling and that online poker as we know it is about to end. Or at least [...]

The End is Nigh! Or is it? It all began in 1992 when a thing called Chinook took on a man called Dr. Marion Tinsley. Who he and what it, I expect you’re wondering? Well, Tinsley was as close to god as you can get in the sleepy world of draughts (checkers). In his World [...]

The Set Up I’m writing this as the main event goes into Day Four, and all we know for sure is that the winner is going to get around $8,000,000 this time. Not a bad chunk of change. And as I watch the hand by hand reporting come over the internet – an experience very [...]

The son of a friend of mine was in trouble a couple of years ago – he’d done too much internet gambling and lost way beyond his means playing poker and blackjack online. When his mother told me about it, my first thought was: blackjack? Of course the sucker lost. My second was: I hope [...]

Al Alvarez talks at some length in his first posting about the fact that poker is a game of skill, not of luck. But Al, like all of us from time to time, must have experienced a period of constant outdraws. This is an incredibly frustrating time for a poker-player, and as we all know [...]

Important note: I used to work for PokerStars; I don’t any more. What I’m writing here is my opinion, and not necessarily PokerStars’ opinion. Please don’t confuse the two. An interesting thread has started up on 2+2 – the original poster suggests that online poker players be identified as simply "Player1", "Player2", or other relatively [...]

On-line the other day, a player responded to a particularly cruel bad beat by launching into a bitter tirade against the injustice and dishonesty of all internet poker sites. The games were fixed, he wrote, most of the players were shills working for the virtual casinos, innocent amateurs like him didn’t have a chance. And [...]