Now What?. Kris Anderson
Now What?
Online Poker after Black Friday
Kris Anderson, MS, LMFT
Copyright © 2011 Kris Anderson
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2011-09-13
Dedication
To all of my opponents who clamor for my seat when I get up to
leave a winning session.
It’s the player, not the chair.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rich who first introduced me to Texas Hold’em while playing a dealer’s choice home game at his estate many years ago. Rich would rarely show up to his own game with any money. He oftentimes came with a blank check, movie tickets, rolls of pennies, or other trivial crap to barter in place of chips. It was his broke ass who advised me to create this work while we were suffering through a dull $3-6 limit game at the Horseshoe Hammond shortly after Black Friday.
(By the way, Rich, I still have your $80 IOU in my wallet, dude. Time to pay up, you sponge.)
INTRODUCTION
I played live poker earnestly for several years throughout the early part of the new millennium, prior to my online grinding career. As I lived three hours away from the nearest casino, I had no other option but to play in the scarce home games that I could find around town. When these games eventually dried up from lack of interest I found myself searching for action at the local VFW and eventually learned of a backdoor card shop that was ran by the locals. I became a regular between the two games but the questionable legality of these venues just added to my steadily growing angst and disinterest for live poker. I never really enjoyed the dry process of playing live, although I had always done quite well by playing holdem. For me, live poker was a time-consuming, mind-numbing affair, marked with much boredom and many distractions. My interest in holdem dwindled over time and playing poker became more of a recreational event for me rather than a serious financial endeavor.
Like many Americans who held a general interest in holdem over the past decade, I routinely watched ESPN’s coverage of the World Series of Poker every year. The televised tournaments were exciting to watch but only insofar as entertainment value was concerned. I never really thought that normal people with regular jobs and daily responsibilities could ever seriously compete with the professionals in such high-priced events. That was until Chris Moneymaker, a previously unknown accountant from Tennessee, took down the most prestigious poker title after he won his $10,000 buy-in for the Main Event through an online poker site. Following the Moneymaker effect of 2003, online poker sites experienced a tidal wave of new competition as a direct result of thousands of recreational players chasing the dream of becoming the next world champion.
The newfound energy surge within the poker community directly effected me and I too assimilated the Moneymaker bug and became reinvigorated with my desire to play more holdem. I first started playing online through Party Poker in early 2004. I played whenever I had a chance and consequently fell into the school of the tens of thousands of other fish whom the grinders hungrily fed upon. My game sucked. Hard. Whatever luck that I had used by catching the occasional pot at the VFW had quickly left me and I was soon re-depositing fifty bucks into my Party Poker account every couple weeks. Of the few hands that I did win online, it was primarily because my opponents’ internet connection went down and I won by default or everyone folded around to me in the big blind. I was truly awful and I played virtually every hand. Despite losing money every time that I logged on, I loved playing and I was having fun, which was a big change from my days when I strictly played live.
I managed to sink several hundred dollars into Party Poker without making a single withdrawal over the next two years. A few hundred bucks is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. But it is a huge loss rate when you are playing at $0.02-0.04 and $0.05-0.10 limits. (A couple hundred dollars is a shit load of pennies and nickels!) Nevertheless, my hemorrhaging of pocket change came to an end in October 2006 after the UIGEA bill was passed through congress and online gambling was outlawed. Party Poker quickly drew out of the U.S. market and the feeding frenzy from competing sites began. The remaining poker sites developed myriad means and methods to circumvent the American banking restrictions posed by the UIGEA legislation and quickly filled the hole left by Party Poker’s absence. Of the various sites who jockeyed for former Party Poker accounts, I chose to go with PokerStars due to the similarity in player interfaces between the two companies.
I took upon myself a whole new approach to online poker with the shifting over of my account to PokerStars. I began to study more, play more consistently, and I purchased the Poker Tracker 3 statistical software package to help chart my progress. As the years ticked away, I consumed every poker book that I came across and implemented the strategies found within. I soon started developing my own strategies, made complex notes, and became interested in game theory and statistics. By the time 2010 rolled around, I was crushing every live game that I sat in on and had made a steady profit through the micro stakes online. Rather than moving up in limits with my new bankroll, I sought to generate statistically significant sample sizes of win rates in attempts to prove to myself that my results were more than just good fortune or a lucky run of cards.
My grind was steady throughout the spring of 2011 while I worked my way through the micro limits on PokerStars. Going into the second week of April, I had generated a 45-degree angled graph over 419,215 hands at a very respectable win rate. I grew proficient with the usage of various statistical parameters provided by the Poker Tracker 3 software; I had detailed notes and analyses, complete with counter attacks and color-coded labels, on all of my most frequently encountered opponents. My goal to reach half a million hands by June was well within reach. If my win rate continued to maintain, I planned to abandon the micro limits over the summer and graduate into the mid-stakes realm with a sizeable bankroll and a demonstrated skill level to match. I even had thoughts of shutting down my mental health clinic and making a go out of being a full-time, online poker player.
Then the bottom fell out.
On April 15th, 2011 I had just returned home from my afternoon therapy sessions and was seated upon the porcelain throne when I received a text message from an associate of mine. He asked if I had tried to log into my PokerStars account that day. I responded that I had not but was fixing to as soon as I finished with my dung deposit and made a flush. After I finished pinching a loaf, I made my way to my computer and then experienced the harsh fate that so many of us had suffered on Black Friday. PokerStars (in addition to Full Tilt and Ultimate Bet) had blocked all American players’ accounts. My bankroll had been seized. The win rate graph that I was so proudly building had ground to a screeching halt. All at once, my dreams sunk down into the sewer to join the fecal matter that I had relinquished into the Earth just moments before.
My confusion over what had occurred was followed by a frantic web search for information. The professional players whom I followed on Twitter were silent about the developments. The strategy forums buzzed with speculations and rumors. Even the news articles held inconsistencies. Within a few days time the truth came forward, followed by an ominous Department of Justice seal on the PokerStars website that marked its ultimate doom. Once the gravity of the situation finally took hold of me I was left with a single question that permeated to the core of my being: “Now what?”
I worked my way through a plethora of negative