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Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

April 21, 2007

Bits and Pieces of Poker Thought

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. -- Frank Zappa

I suspect the infamous bill aimed at keeping U.S. citizens off the Internet gambling sites isn't working -- at least not when it comes to poker. There's no way I can verify this suspicion but over the past few months I've paid visits (as a lurker, not a player) to several sites that still court U.S players and quite frankly, I haven't notice a decrease in activity.

I know there are a gazillion people in the world who don't live within the confines of this minute portion of North America but I don't believe they miraculously filled in the gaps supposedly created by a mass exodus of fearful inhabitants of these 50 states.

Play on!

An old friend came to visit last week. We discussed online poker, of course, and she told me she had one of those aha moments. You know, the kind where you suddenly get something? While playing heads-up, she suddenly realized how easy it would be to launder money. My response was a simple "duh."

Without some kind of watchdog system in place to closely monitor money going out of and coming into the U.S. as a result of online poker.

Then again, look at the great success the ONDCP (Office of National Drug Control Policy) has been. Here's an entire bureaucratic agency with a massive budget and a tidy number of employees (the number isn't given anywhere in the massive website), and the figures show that overall dependence on a single drug (meth) has increased. Makes one think, doesn't it, that no matter how much money we allot and no matter how many people we employ, we seem to get bogged down in grunt work and statistical figuring to handle the task at hand? So an Office of National Online Gambling Control Policy probably would do little more than keep innocent people innocent, and create jobs.

On an entirely different subject, I wonder if perhaps intellectually we are trying to make poker a game of absolute decisions. I'm finding the newer books on poker seem to be trying to evaluate every possible hand and every possible outcome of every possible hand to allow every possible decision to be committed to memory. In a perfect world, perhaps that's possible but poker is not a perfect world.

While I enjoy watching the thought processes of the technical writers, I get rather bored with them as well. That might be the curse of creativity or the dearth of math background but I'd still rather read about how someone came to a conclusion than how someone should come to a conclusion.

It's nice not to experience negativity but sometimes lessons learned from experience far outweigh lessons learned from books.

Mr. Nice Guy has a new book. That's Vince Burgio for those of you who don't know him by his nickname. Vince, who was a poker pro before many of the 20-somethings crop of current pros were of legal age (actually since 1987) pens a regular column for Card Player magazine. Mostly he comments on those who people the game, about the kind of experiences he's had, about the positive and negative aspect of life as it evolves in this precarious game. Even when he's telling the world how much he dislikes something, Vince does it with class. Appropriately, the book is called Inside Poker: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. If you're looking for some interesting sort reads, pick it up.

There's more news for the nice guys of poker, albeit this tidbit is a bit late. Lou Krieger, better known for his run of best-selling poker books, is now the go-to guy for articles in Poker Player magazine.

Adieu Planet Poker. As of last month's last day, this trend-setting online poker room dealt its last computer generated hand.

And finally, an interesting interpretation or the old don't-argue-semantics clichŽ. If the bill is called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, doesn't it sound as if Internet Gambling Enforcement is unlawful?