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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?"
My money's on the really big gambling:
- What I bought on eBay is what I actually get
- Living on top of a fault line
- Hope against evidence that the price of gas will actually go down with the increase in available crude (actual crude price increase in past year 66%, gasoline price increase over same period 132%, source BBC)
- One day my comic book collection may approach in sticker price value
- My donation to Katrina relief won't go into some fat-cat's pocket.
Besides, with the price of gas being so high who has money left to gamble?A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here in Houston, we have so many bars and lounges that host poker tournaments and the like, some of which have some very nice prizes for the winners, almost making the online world seem nowhere near as fun or productive. I am sure that everyone can explain to you what Texas Hold'em is by this time...
Looks like they need to find another fad to promote to the online community... and pray that TV doesn't steal the show once again...
Need a Nerd?
Nerd Systems
There's just a different feeling going to a Casino vs gambling at home. All of the drinks are free (As in Beer, lots of beer!) and so ar the Cigars if you gamble long enough. Besides, online gambling to me at least has the Shady, can I really win at this because who's governing a small island in the pacific's website to make sure I even have a chance, vybe. Gambling inside casinos is the only place I want to Gamble. Besides, it woudl be too easy to get COmpletely addicted if I could plug in to the Internet and gamble my life away.
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
Apparently the novelty is wearing off and no new players can be found. Why have you stopped playing?
There was a story, what, a week ago(?) about how people are writing scripts and programs to play these online poker sites for real money, against real people... maybe people are just getting tired of getting owned by a small executable? I don't know, maybe not, but I'm sure that has something to do with it.
Oh, and school's starting up, so wannabe-pro college students don't have enough time anymore to play poker all day. Again, just speculation.
- dshaw
Trend: Poker in particular is very trendy, and like all trends, it will pass, some will stay, but most will go.
Truth: At some point you will realize that you are not the next incarnation of Chris Moneymaker and never will be. No easy path for you to riches and fame. If you really love playing, you'll probably stick it out over the long term and may "make it" at some point, but most people today want the quick fix and lose interest if their fortunes don't come quick enough. That and the realization that it takes ALOT of time of your day if you are attempting to be "profitable" playing online. Again, think its an easy fix, then reality and truth set in.
And if you play "play money" games and freeroll tourneys, LOL, thats not real on so many levels.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Sure, Party Poker's revenue is down, but they still get 40,000+ players at a time. There's gotta be another 50 sites out there, too - none of them are as big as party, but they're out there. Ultimatebet, Pokerroom.com, Paradise Poker, Pacific Poker, Interpoker, etc, etc, etc...
People talk a lot about bots, but if they're out there, they suck. I play up to 2/4 limit Hold 'em, and 1-2 NL Hold 'em, as well as Omaha hi/lo, and I'm a consistent winner (I track every session I play). I play 6-8 hours a week, usually while the wife is watching dawson's creek, or some other equally girly dvd. We get to sit together, each doing something we enjoy, and I clear anywhere from $400 - $800 a month.
In short: people still play, decent players win, and (from what I've read), the bots are really, really bad.
Juiced? Or Not?
or they didn't have money to start with. personally, i love to play poker, especially texas hold 'em. but i am also just at the poverty line as a grad student, which means it would be fairly irresponsible for me to spend what little extra money I have on that rather than taking my wife to the movies or something (also a rare occurence).
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
I deposited $250 at Pokerstars in August 2003. I play nearly every day. My wife does as well. We don't have a fortune or even a small fortune... but we still have our $250 and a profit. During these two years Pokerstars has made thousands off our playing, but not from us. Our secret is only playing in small sit 'n go tournaments. It is very easy for the casinos to keep track of collusion in these. Because you need money in the bank, it is not easy to quickly change names, so players who play too many of these together stick out like a sore thumb. All the games I've played online have made me a much better player at brick and mortar casinos. I've played tens of thousands of hands at Pokerstars - a lifetime of hands - in two years. When I'm playing live, it's as if I can see through the other player's cards.
[I'm the grand-parent]
:)
Yep, there are plenty of ways to tell if people are cheating. Although most of the colluding players will never see the flop, you still know what their cards were. If the odds are 1/3 to see a flop and you have 6/10 players, you still have 2:1 odds before the cards even hit the table.
Of course, there are other things you have to watch out for. Make sure that no two players are always at the same table (i.e. pool players from a account pool at least 3x as large as what you play with). Make sure that players don't all join the table at the same time.
Then there are other things you can do. Occasionally, a player will be banned from playing at the same table with another player (happens 99% of the time whenever any of the statistical filters trip, or a player reports suspected collusion) and then you just cash out those players, close the accounts and make some new e-mails/bank accounts/ip's/poker accounts.
Also, I'm not saying that every table is a death trap. in 15/30 or 20/40 playing a few hours a day a couple days a week my little poker group makes a very nice living. We aren't planning a buyout of Microsoft yet, but we all can quit our jobs if we wanted to and having a room full of LCD's, comfortable chairs, nice computers, and redundant internet connections is nice. We all have nice PC's and paid off our cars.
Believe it or not, we pay taxes too (we're not stupid
When I look at stock prices, most of them seem to be overpriced, bid up by investors who have unrealistic expectations of future growth and profits. Everyone expects their horse to be the winner.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
[I'm the grand-parent AC]
When you're talking about bots, I'm sure that there are many poker bots at the sub-dollar tables, however they are mostly people who paid their $29.99 for the win-money-while-you-sleep poker bot from the latest spam e-mail. They aren't sophisticated enough to cause you any harm, and you should be able to beat them easier than an average player. They most definitely won't be colluding.
What we do differently than the bots is that we're all good at poker. We're not going to and play by a chart, but we all sat down and read the books and learned the game. We regularly practice solo to get better, and we know how to "not be stupid". Of course we have all the pot odds calculated and the percentages for each hand available to us when the cards are dealt and after every bet, but again, we don't play on those religiously. We know when to try and bet up to knock someone out, and when to try and milk every chip on the table. That's what people need to be afraid of, not your everyday poker bot.
As far as the other tables go, it's funny you mention the 5/10 tables. One of the things we regularly do with our accounts is "go lose $100" (inside joke: to keep the filters on our side, we'll "go lose $100" on a 2/4 or a 5/10 table on the accounts from time to time. Whenever someone does something stupid, we'll tell them to "Go lose $100"... strange looks are always abound when we say it in front of girlfriends/relatives who don't know the rest of the story.) However, we also practice new techniques (non-poker) and servers on the low limit tables as well. I don't think we've ever played at anything less than 1/2, but anything below 5/10 is not worth playing in general because the players who play below 5/10 play significantly different than the players that play above.
Tournament tables should be perfectly safe. We've never tried to play tournaments, mostly because there is no way to make sure that we end up at the same table.
Party poker.net's adware is natorious for both a. automatically updating over the internet, and b. having pathetic protection against suspicious hackers taking over said 'automatic update' process to replace key system dlls with trojans.
They have not done anything about the security problem, so anti-virus software as well as adware recognizes and removes party poker.nets malware and thus people can't use 'party games' software anymore.
I've told my relative countless times 'but you have to stop reinstalling this one program that keeps messing up your computer' but he keeps reinstalling party poker software no matter how many times I have to restore windows a 'pre' infected state.
total dumbass. a hacker knows his ip block and keeps scanning for the party poker update port and keeps on rezombifying him... luser..
I've been playing online poker professionally for around 2 years now. I've worked my bankroll to the point where I can play and beat the biggest games offered. I spend about half my waking hours playing poker or involved in the poker scene, so I feel like I'm speaking with some authority here.
:)
Online poker is growing faster than ever. While party gaming's stock has taken a recent hit, that does not at all reflect the growth of the entire industry. Sites such as Pokerstars, Bodog poker, and Full Tilt Poker have all doubled or tripled their average traffic over the past six months. Party poker is continuing to grow, though not at the same speed it once was. This is mostly due to better marketing from their competitors such as Pokerstars, and the fact that Party poker is offering an inferior product.
Online poker will eventually reach it's peak and start to decline. But it's not there yet. And in my opinion, it won't be for a few more years at the very least.
I find all the comments about poker bots and widespread collusion laughable. Collusion may exist in the lower limits, but rarely goes for long without detection. I'm confident that it's somewhere between extremely rare and nonexistant in the big games, because frankly, if it weren't, there is no way I would be able to make anywhere near as much money as I do. It is easy to blame losses on a "rigged site" or "cheaters", but the fact is online poker is a secure, fair, game. And I, as well as several of my friends, have made a ton of money at it. All without poker bots
But isn't it actually faster to type words that involve multiple fingers than the same finger? If you are touch typing at a reasonable speed (at least say 80-100wpm), then hitting a key 3 times with the same finger is much slower than hitting 3 keys with 3 different fingers, because when one finger is hitting the key, the next finger can be on its way down, so you get 'hit-hit-hit' rather than 'hit-raise-hit-raise-hit'. So a word that uses multiple fingers should be much easier if you're a decent typist.
(we can maybe guess that maybe this means that AOL users have not learned how to type properly)
As for underscores, they're really quite easy to type once you get used to it because you learn where the - key is and hit it just as quickly as any other. You could argue that it would be better to name variables like 'ThisIsAVariable' (Microsoft style), but then you are hitting the same number of keys--still hitting the shift key and another key at the same time--so it doesn't save any time unless you are not accustomed to the finger positioning of the - key (which you will be if you use it often enough).