Enter internet poker as the happy medium.
I made a decent amount of beer and book money in my college poker playing days. I assess my skill level as averagish, maybe slightly above. The real key to a good real money poker game for earnings potential is finding people who refuse to realize that they aren’t that good. I didn’t have to try to force the issue. I merely took advantage of existing personalities and the “tells”.
Playing poker against real people face to face is vastly different than hiding behind a keyboard. And the internet is already full of stories of scandals, cheating and bots and collusion and site operators involved in all sorts of other illegal behavior. As this is only a prelude I’m not going to dwell on the old stories. Do yourself a favor and Google related phrases like “internet poker scandal”, “poker bots scam”, etc…. There are even stories from this decade. Although some of the stories date back to the 1990’s the cheating is still being talked about now.
I had the opportunity to invest a lot of spare time into investigating what was going on. Poker is what I cut my teeth on for researching grifter tactics. What people still don’t get that these are not some random hacker type creating a super bot to infiltrate and overpower clueless human players. The sites themselves create them.
I could play free tables with fake money every day and find multiple people going all in. Every. Single. Hand. And it working. An average human will first not recognize that the opponents are displaying red flags of something nefarious, and second assume that they are better than this “person” and figure that instead of heading for the hills double down on the idea that they are a super good poker player and that they are due.
It’s startling how the similarities to current conspiracy grifting.
1). Mindless games on free money tables called race games were created that the rule was to go all in every hand. No serious player would ever get involved. The purpose was astroturfing and led to a Guinness record for one site dealing the most hands ever. Big whoop dee do. It was all bots and people from dirt poor countries being paid a pittance to just mindlessly go nuts every hand.
2). A honeymoon period. The chat was usually pretty idle. But starting a new account on the many sites popping up, you’d almost always get a single account trying to get a read on you. What’s the weather like where you live. Phishing for info. Consoling you on your bad luck. Trying to convince you that the cards are indeed random, you are good. And you just need to switch to the real money games where the play is more honest. Add “<poker site name> cards not random” to your Google search list. Just like the newbie conspiracist never researching the things they should actually be searching for, keeping the “I’m smart because my smartphone says I am crowd” in the dark as long as possible.
3). Celebrity endorsements. You couldn’t swing a dead cat without finding a TV poker game. And they all had their visors promoting the site that paid them to wear the swag. Just like the celebrity cult member who doesn’t see the human rights violations going on in the background, these are treated differently in an online game. No super bots cheating them. No public interviews of them actually doing real investigation they could have done on what the masses of those who had been scammed see.
4). The chat was by rule all English. Superficially this makes sense as it is deemed more universal and global. But the chat on low level, mindless tables was insane, if it existed at all. Numerous times I witnessed a scripted conversation. And the real presence behind the chat not understand English. Just like the phone scammer following a script that can get thrown off by a talented scam baiter. The phrases that these people actually understand were limited to conversations like “NH”, a responding “TY”, and occasionally a “GG”. Hardly a sign of actual human activity. Really useful to explain why eight bots against one human aren’t saying anything meaningful.
5). Odd games that nobody could truly master. In real life, a limit Omaha Hi-Lo game every day by thousands of people? Ain’t gonna happen. This is an excuse for a long term super bot. A champ who is given an aura of expertise that is fueled by non random cards.
If pressed I could list more detail and some amusing anecdotes. The point of this post in the series is to emphasize the graduation from a newly created strategy game into the realm of a game with a rich historic background and known rules. A game, as I’ve said, between the games appealing to a brain that could use some more life experience that has some luck involved and a game that is more purely intellectual like chess.
The poker sites were (are?) ineffectively regulated. The attitude of these, with offices in odd places like the Isle of Man, was it was more cost efficient to pay a fine than worry about trying to stop the gravy train. People were so gullible, so dead set on doubling down (in the conspiracy theory definition, not blackjack) they would get fed up with being cheated on one site and simply move on to another equally bad site. Convinced their luck was about to change; that they are gambler’s fallacy due. Making them the type of people prone to getting into a negative feedback loop gambling addiction scenario.
Although I’ve stayed away from naming sites for the same reason I didn’t mention specific strategy games, I will put out this one piece of more direct info.
Howard was a feature on TV poker and endorsed Full Tilt Poker. Long before Full Tilt poker was shut down I recognized some of the details of I presented here. Knowing what I knew then and applying that knowledge to the Alex Jones method of operation was an easy step for me. There’s so much money to be made in the world of gullibility and hatred it’s thoroughly depressing at times.
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