Slashdot Mirror
Online Gambling Running Out of Steam
dreamchaser writes "After a meteoric rise, online gambling companies appear to be taking a beating now with the loss of 33% in PartyGaming stock. Apparently the novelty is wearing off and no new players can be found. Why have you stopped playing?"
I never have done online gambling. I have had to fix HUNDREDS of pc's where the morons on the pc's did and had lots of spyware. Many of these took format/reload to completely fixed. the average bill for the systems that weren't formatted was about $120.
"In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?"
Online poker has so many advantages over live play that I couldn't even name them all. Fact is, poker has been around for a long time, it became popular on the web for a REASON (many of them). As for TV stealing the show, Poker on TV and Poker on the `Net can thank eachother for everything they have right now.
This is the problem with companies going public that shouldn't.
The stock market is all about growth, not profit.
Have a compay that makes 100 billion trillion dollars a year?
Great, but next year you will have to make 200 billion trillion or else your stock will tank. Its not just about being profitable, stock is all about growth. If not you better pay one hell of a dividend.
Party Poker just posted 82% revanue growth, and over 100% revanue growth in their poker devision (they also do online slots, etc.) in their latest earnings report. They merely meantioned that their growth can't continue to double every few months forever as it has been doing. PartyPoker is the best in the business, and they aren't going to fizzle out any time soon. And there will be no shortage of players unless people are forced to stop.
Don't forget "boats" in some states (Mississippi, Indiana, maybe others)
Here in California Shell tried to close a PROFITABLE refinery last year. Turns out it could make more money buy reducing the available gas/diesel supply (and charging more) than it could from the refinery. Luckly the state forced them to sell the refinery. The oil companies have found out when the power companies have found out, if you keep capacity close to demand you can charge what you want.
I play no limit holdem at least 3 times a week, cash games with about 300 in chips on the table at a given point. I go to Foxwoods when I get a chance and am up about 3K over the past three months.
ONLINE POKER IS BULLSHIT
I think playing against people you can't see, especially with most people playing free chips is bullshit. They have no concept of what they are betting. 90% of everyone out there who plays online absolutely destroys any advice you could get from a book. I don't do local free tournaments either. All of it destroys your ability to play for real money. I have a couple of friends qho still play online with real money. They do ok. But when they play with real people, they suck. Ever notice when you play online, almost every hand has someone sucking out? (sucking out is when someone with crappy cards stays in and wins when you had a great hand all along.)
Poker is great, but poker with live humans, cigar smoke and liquor is WAY WAY better. People are still playing, just not in a dark room alone.
yep, with programs such as WinHoldem, it makes cheating a lot easier!
it even has a link for Detection Avoidance advice.
from this article: , one poker bot feature is Team Mode: Flick on Team mode and you can collude with other humans running WinHoldEm at the table.
HD Trailers
I've been making a killing at online poker for about 14 months now. Most of my time is spent at Party affiliates, probably about 85%. There continue to be more people online playing just as poorly as at any time in the last year. Bots are not a problem, collusion is not a problem, online poker sites cheating you is not a problem. Frankly these fear mongering threads are frustrating for us because if anything is interfering with this industry, it's dumbasses spreading around propeganda about how online poker is rigged, legions of bots await you to take your every last dime, and everyone else is a cheater.
(a) Poker sites are not out to cheat you. They're making a fortune by raking every pot, why jeopardize it by cheating as well? Why are focused and dedicated players able to beat the game consistently?
(b) Poker bots are not a problem. There are no known profitable bots, winholdem is a joke, and it's best success stories are almost surely less effective than a good human player. If there are massively successful bots out there, nobody knows about them. Poker remains a game of incomplete information which involves a great deal of finesse and instinct. Coding this into a bot is NOT trivial, and while I don't doubt that it would be possible to write one to post mild profits at the lowest limits, it won't pose a threat to a reasonably competant player. A bot will not know what you hold, will be just as easy to fool or extract money from as people, perhaps even more so once you can isolate and understand it's behavior. Bots are the last thing on my mind at the table.
(c) Collusion is a problem, but it's ridiculusly easy to detect. Groups of people constantly signing on together, playing the same tables, leaving together, that's just a start. You can only do that for a very short time. Then tack on even simplistic collusion detection to find trends of raises that are simply to build up pots, odd behavior outside of that players normal reaction in that situation, even a computer science undergrad could code relatively effective detection for this. Poker sites have every reason to try and protect their players from this, and they do, see point (a). Collusion certainly does take place, most likely in the higher limits where it's more worthwhile, but it's going to be extremely difficult to pull off for any sustained amount of time. I've seen poker sites effort to prevent it first hand, collusion is NOT something I worry about.
Why Party's stock is down I have no idea. Does this necessarily correlate to their profits? Their attendance? Their new signups? The games certainly aren't drying up, that much I can vouch for.
I like ice cream.
And yes, the poker comment spam is out of control. It's all driven by botnets. My blogs periodically get hit by these crapfloods, and you see the exact same comment or trackback sent to 25 posts from 20 different IP addresses in a couple minutes. Not hard to figure out ... just a pain to defend and clean up.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge