It took half an hour, but eventually I talked him down from the ledge. Las Vegas is crawling with tourists, and they are really, really bad at poker. So what if there are a few more decent players in the game?

I did acknowledge that we’d probably see a few more internet kids in the live Vegas casino games than before. Six months hence, the games are still great, but yes, there are internet kids.

The thing is, these internet kids can be annoying, but I see them make a lot of mistakes. I think it’s because they haven’t correctly adjusted their internet style to the much different live games. The mistakes they make tend to be of the “shooting themselves in the foot” variety. They’re winning in the games, no doubt, but if they just took a step back and thought about their new environment, they’d win more. A quick primer on variance and Onlinecasino.ca. I want to write a few articles about what I see them doing wrong.

To understand why these mistakes are mistakes, you need a little background information. Say you’re playing $3-$6 at an online casino. A respectable winrate in that game, one that indicates that you are “hanging with the regs” so to speak, might be 20 cents a hand. That works out to $20/100 hands which is a bit over 1.5ptbb/100. With rakeback you’re making a little more.

Now look at a $2-$5 live game. Theoretically it’s slightly smaller, but the game (on a good day at least) plays a little deeper, and the preflop raises are bigger, so it’s about the same size. A respectable winrate in this game is $30/hour which, at 30 hands an hour, is $1 a hand. The live game has 5x the winrate. These numbers are for a respectable reg in these games, not for the best player at the stakes. The best players in these games could double or possibly even triple these numbers.

Bottom line is, live games are, on a per-hand basis, MUCH more profitable. Why? Because live games feature people who make absolutely horrendous errors for huge bets on the turn and river. Just two days ago I saw someone call a 3-bet river overbet shove for more than $1,000 in a $2-$5 game on a KKJK7 board. It doesn’t happen every session, obviously, but it’s not uncommon to ship it in on the river for 100BB or more and get called by an absolutely hopeless hand.

Since this is such a tremendous source of profit, live game players have to tailor their strategies to captilize on these opportunities. Sometimes this means passing on smaller edges that present themselves earlier in a hand. Internet players make mistakes that prevent these opportunities from materializing because they are used to exploiting much thinner edges online.

Problem 1. Bad preflop 3-betting.

Anyone who has played in both live and online casinos knows that there’s way more 3-betting preflop online than live. To survive in online no-limit hold’em games, you have to learn how to play a balanced 3-bet, 4-bet, and 5-bet preflop strategy. The “standard” 3-bet range online is AA-TT, AK-AQ. To this range, players add 3-bet bluffs. And in some situations they add more value 3-betting hands as well.

Why is this 3-betting so critical online? Most pots online get opened for a raise. Therefore, players are opening a wide range of weak hands. If you were to 3-bet only strong hands, your opponents could fold every time you 3-bet and play only against your middling hands. Therefore, you have to balance your value 3-bets with bluffs. When an opponent suspects you are bluffing too often, he begins to rebluff you with 4-bets. And so on.

Live games are very different for a few reasons. First, many pots are limped, so preflop raising ranges tend in many situations to be stronger than they are online. This makes 3-bet bluffing less profitable.

Second, many live players call 3-bets way too loosely. Two days ago the under the gun player opened for $20 in a $2-$5 game with a $300 stack. The next player called with a $200 stack. Another player called and it came to me in the big blind. I had AcAs. I raised to $85. Both the under the gun player and the next player called. The flop was J94. I shoved. The preflop raiser called me with 88, and the next player, the one who called $85 preflop and had only $115 left in an absolutely massive pot, folded.

Third, when you 3-bet, you muscle people out of the pot. Yes, players call 3-bets too loosely, but even tourists don’t just cold-call a 3-bet with any old two cards. Say a bad players limps and a good hand-reading LAG isolates to $25 from two off the button. The big blind is the worst player in the game and he has $1,500 behind. You cover the table and you have a playable hand. Is it better to 3-bet light to try to punish the LAG for getting out of line a little with his isolation raises? Or is it better just to see a flop with two miserably terrible players who will ship it in on the river in hopeless situations?

This is the point. Yes, the LAG is getting out of line, and you can punish that by 3-betting lighter. Online this would be a good adjustment, because often it would be the only realistic alternative to folding and making nothing from the hand.

But in a live game, you’re making cents when you could be making dollars. The good hand-reading LAG is not going to feed your $1+/hand winrate. The fish are. When you shut them out, you’re turning your massive live winrate into a paper-thin online winrate. Bad play.

So when should you 3-bet live? Most of the time, you 3-bet when players will call you with worse hands. It’s fine to 3-bet AJ if you think a fish will call OOP with hands like Jc8c.

But say a strongish player has opened and you’re next in the pot. Do you 3-bet JJ? In an online game you often do, but in a live game it’s not as good a play. By getting the pot heads-up with a decent player with the bottom of your value 3-betting range, you’re taking a good hand and turning it into a razor-thin winner (razor-thin by live game standards). Flat calling, letting two fish into the pot, and then stacking one of them when you make top full might be more profitable.

AA is a special case. There’s more incentive to 3-bet AA even against a good player because the potential to get stacks in preflop is so valuable. Even KK isn’t nearly as good to 3-bet because when stacks go in you’re against AA a decent percentage of the time. But I virtually always 3-bet AA even when fish are lurking because I can get it in against AK or QQ and have enormous equity.

In conclusion, I’m not saying 3-betting preflop is bad in live games. I do it a fair bit. But I tend to do it more for value and less as a bluff. If I do it as a bluff, I typically do it with a hand that has little-to-no value even against a fish if I called to see a flop. I’m not in a live game to play for thin edges against decent players. I’m in a live game to see flops against horrendous players, and that’s what I do.

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But I thought Bill’s feedback needed a new post to properly address. If you haven’t been following the discussion, definitely check out Bill’s post Online Poker Isn’t Rigged . . . Again!.

Bill makes essentially two points. First, he doesn’t think the risk/reward ratio is there to make it worth a big site’s while to try to rig their deck, and second he thinks actually rigging the deck is a lot harder than I made it sound.

Why Rig A Deal?

Bill said:

So, if we’re talking about a top ten room then I would say that the motivation for rigging the game favors not rigging it. As I articulate in a previous post there are so many other ways for a poker room to increase its profits from you that are entirely legitimate. And if you took the time to brainstorm a bit I’m sure you could come up with ten or fifteen more suggestions of minor tweaks the room could make to the game that would generate more hands per hour and/or more profits for the room. Until someone can answer for me why a room would go to all of the trouble to rig the game before having exhausted these other much more simple methods then I simply cannot buy this argument as being logical. Granted, a poker room might act in an illogical manner but if we’re to assume that all actors act in a logical manner then this doesn’t hold up.

I do sort of dismiss this argument, and I do so for two reasons. First, Bill poses a false either/or here. He suggests the cardroom could increase profits either in legitimate ways or by rigging the deck, and he prefers the legitimate ways. But obviously cardrooms could try both at the same time. There’s no reason for me to think that a cardroom would order these options in a “try all legitimate options then try rigging” manner.

Second, Bill says, “if we’re to assume that all actors act in a logical manner…” which I always think is a poor assumption. Most people aren’t strictly logical thinkers, and online cardrooms have, in my opinion, demonstrated many times over that they are run by people who often don’t make entirely logical decisions. And, beyond that, even “logical” people can be prone to making rash decisions when doom and gloom appears to be forthcoming. I’m reiterate the scenario I posed in the comments of the previous post. A major cardroom does an analysis of its traffic and concludes that even though it appears healthy to the casual observer, it’s actually in danger of losing a critical mass of customers within two or three years time. I could easily see a manager panicking and making an “illogical” decision under these circumstances.

Before I move on to the meat of this post, I want to reiterate that I’m not accusing any site of being rigged, and the vast majority of claims of rigging can be dismissed nearly on face. My whole point in this series of posts is to encourage people not to stick their heads in the sand. A site’s deal could be altered now and not yet have been discovered, or at some point in the future an honest site could turn dishonest. It’s possible, and the player community should be as vigilant as reasonably possible. That’s my argument.

How To Rig A Deal

Moving on. Bill argues that rigging the game to the benefit of a cardroom is neither easy to accomplish nor easy to conceal:

One of the other factors such an argument fails to properly consider is that over 90% of poker players are break-even or losing poker players. So what exactly is a fish? How are you going to rig the game in favor of the fish when there are so many fish and so few sharks? How would you determine which players to rig the action for and which one’s to shaft?

In my previous post, I mentioned that cardrooms could alter the game to improve their profitability. It’s been suggested by others that by rigging hands to favor “the fish” one could do so. That’s certainly a reasonable place to start, but I’m not arguing that helping out the fish means more money for a cardroom. That argument comes from other people, not from me.

My only point is that there likely exists some change one could make to the deal that would improve cardroom profitability. If you don’t grant that point, then you’re claiming that no-limit hold’em as it stands is essentially the perfect game for a cardroom to spread.

In any event, I think Bill is chasing his tail a bit here when he talks about how it’s hard to identify the “fish” from the “sharks”. I don’t think that it’s necessary to solve that problem at all. The theoretically dishonest cardroom cares about altering the game to make more profit, not necessarily helping one set of players against another.

Having said that, I do concede that if a cardroom were to explore these options, they might start by considering ways to blunt slightly the advantage a skilled player has. Here are possible alterations to the deal that might accomplish this goal without being too complicated:

1. The cardroom could skew all-in confrontations to slightly boost the chances that the underdog hand wins. For instance, once two players are all-in, it could quickly calculate the equities of each hand and then deal cards such that the underdog hand consistently wins slightly more often than it “should”. Perhaps it could turn all 80-20 confrontations into 78-22 affairs. I mention this change first because it’s a specific one I’ve seen posited before.
2. If the proposal above is too blunt an instrument (and possibly too detectable), then the cardroom could slightly shade the odds in favor of the player who called all-in at the expense of the player who bet all-in. So if I semi-bluff all-in and you call me, I would have a slightly worse chance than I “should” to win the hand.
3. If you’re worried about detection, all-in hands are possibly not the best ones to alter since hand histories report the results of them with nearly complete information. So perhaps you alter the deal in non-all-in situations to slightly favor the player who called a bet over the player who made the bet. This would have the effect of making plays like firing turn barrels less effective since the calling player would “get there” more often than they should between the flop and turn.

Again, I’m not sure what game alterations would benefit the cardroom and what alterations wouldn’t. But I think it’s clear that at least some alterations exist that would benefit the cardroom, and I think a dishonest cardroom could use trial and error to try to find some that work to their benefit.

Also, note that these are all simple, systematic alterations to the game. They don’t require identifying “fish” and “sharks”, and they don’t require rigging hands individually according to some complex algorithm.

How To Hide The Evidence

The obvious criticism of this sort of alteration is that it would be detectable. Build a database of a few gazillion hands, run the right tests on it, and viola, you’re a newly minted whistleblower. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s that simple, and part of the reason is that the burden of proof currently lies almost entirely on the accuser and not at all on the cardroom.

Plausible deniability. It’s a powerful weapon. Someone posts an article saying, “I think the deal at cardroom XYZ is rigged subtly in this peculiar way that benefits them. Here’s my data.”

Cardroom has the following response:

1. We emphatically deny it. Why would we rig a deal when we already make so much money?
2. That effect you observed is so small it’s probably just luck.
3. If you go digging through the data enough, you’ll always find something that looks out of the ordinary.
4. Prominent players A, B, and C have won a ton of money on our site. Clearly that makes the deal fair.
5. Our code is audited by 3rd, 4th, and 5th parties. By the way, you’re just some jerk on 2+2.

Yada yada. Standard stonewalling tactics. In the meantime, the cardroom just backs out the offending code and the effect disappears. Just a weird run of cards, guys… nothing to see here.

In fact, the cardroom would likely get early warning that someone was on to them by reading 2+2. It’s not like the AP/UB thing were there were a few offending screen names that could be tracked. We’re talking about a systematic effect that would be reasonably subtle and where no one could easily point to a timestamp on, “See, as soon as we started talking about it the offending parties fled to a desert island.”

In other words, as long as they were sufficiently subtle about it, it would be very hard to detect in the first place (especially because no one that I know that has any skill at this sort of thing is really looking for it), and if detected, there’s simply no smoking gun. Just hire a PR firm and blast away until the controversy goes away.

Hiding The Evidence In An Even Sneakier Way

If you wanted to alter the game more than a few percentage points and still not get caught, you could probably do so nearly undetectably by piggybacking on a well-known effect that’s not well-studied. For instance, card removal.

I saw some post where someone noted that small cards were more likely to come on the river than big cards. A deuce is the most likely river card, an ace is the least likely, and the other cards are all distributed uniformly in between. This effect makes some sense from a card removal perspective. Two big hands might tend to see more rivers than one big hand and one small hand or two small hands. Big hands are more often made of big cards, and therefore the deck should be slightly rich in small cards by the river.

But how big should this effect be? Who knows? Is a 0.01% difference in frequency between a deuce and an ace reasonable? How about a 0.1% or a 1% or even a 5% difference? Sure, you could take a whack at it with simulation, but it’s hard to simulate the way people actually play… and how people actually play is important when we’re talking about card removal effects.

So say this difference “should” be 1%. The cardroom decides they want to systematically shift results to favor one hand type over another… and they look for opportunities to replace big cards on the river with small cards to make that happen. They replace the cards until the small card big card difference is 3% or 4%.

Anyone who went looking would notice that the all-in results didn’t line up with the theoretical results. But then when they attempted to account for card removal, they’d note that small cards came more frequently than expected on the river… an effect that piggybacks on card removal. Time for alarm bells? Or maybe card removal is just a little stronger an effect than we previously thought. Who knows?

Final Thoughts

None of this is too complicated to pull off. I’m going to alter my deal to favor underdogs in all-in situations. I’m going to carry that out by occasionally substituting a high card that would have come on the river with a small card that helps the underdog. I’m going to do it with a frequency such that it’s hard to detect unless:

1. You’re looking specifically for it
2. You have a huge sample of data
3. You know exactly how much of an effect card removal should have and you can back that out of the data and still detect the anomaly

And then, after you detect it, you have to win the PR war to convince the world that this obscure effect you’ve found is real and you’re not just another “OMG IT’S RIGGED!!!!” kook. And you have to keep people convinced even if the effect subsequently seems to disappear or reverse.

If I’m a cardroom owner with plenty of greed, not a lot of scruples, and a huge ego, I might give it a shot…. even if I ran the biggest, most profitable cardroom in the world. I might be especially inclined to try it if I thought for some reason that my cardroom was on the way out and I needed to act to save it.

Finally, I feel compelled to reiterate some main points from both articles. I have no evidence or reason to believe that any current site has an altered deal. I don’t know how to rig a site to improve its profitability; I merely posit that it’s possible to do so. If a site were rigged in the ways I’m proposing, it would be entirely undetectable to the naked eye. In other words, “I’ve been noticing my good hands getting beaten a lot recently,” is not an observation that would lead me in any way to conclude that anything was wrong with the deal.

But I do think it’s possible. It’s possible an honest site will turn dishonest in the future, and it’s possible that a site we all think is honest today isn’t. It doesn’t mean a good player couldn’t still beat the game consistently or that any one player would get singled out for the doomswitch. But it’s possible that all is not quite as it seems in online poker.

While the vast majority of accusations about boomswitches and doomswitches are likely unfounded, the possibility of altered or manipulated deals is real. If you play online poker seriously, I would suggest that you approach any claims of nefariousness with a healthy dose of skepticism – but also an open mind.

Today I wanted to talk about two recent 2+2 threads related to these issues.

Triple Draw at PokerStars

According to this thread, with confirmation from PokerStars representative Alex Scott, PokerStars has altered their deal in triple draw.

In non-community card games, it’s frequently possible to run out of cards. For instance, if you play an 8-handed stud game, if every player were to see the river it would require 56 cards (plus burn cards). In a 6-handed triple draw game, theoretically speaking each player could consume up to 20 cards each (drawing five cards on each of the three draws), requiring potentially up to 120 cards total (plus burn cards).

Now obviously we’re never likely to see a legitimate hand of triple draw that consumes anywhere near 120 cards. But occasionally more than 52 cards are consumed. In that case, the accepted protocol is to reshuffle the muck and use the discards to complete all the draws.

PokerStars has chosen to alter this protocol slightly. They reshuffle the muck as you would in a brick and mortar game, but they deal out the cards such that no one will receive a card that they have previously discarded. Presumably, before they deal a card to you, they check to make sure you haven’t gotten it already… and if you have, then they deal you the next card.

Quoting Alex Scott:

I can confirm that this is correct. It is not possible to draw a card which you have already discarded at PokerStars, even in Triple Draw.

and

It’s not an error – the decision was made after much discussion and consultation with Team PokerStars (in fact, the original suggestion came from one of the most respected pros on the team). The theory is that no player would want one of their previous discards back, but there is no way to achieve that in a live game. Online, it’s easy, so why not do it?

I have to say, I think this is really quite a bad decision on PokerStars’s part. Here’s why:

1. Online poker is designed as an explicit analog to brick and mortar poker. In other words, by explicitly mimicking the look of a live game (using the same deck, same table look, same deal, same betting structures and rules, even going so far sometimes as to recreate fake dealer boxes), online poker sites are also making implied assurances that the game will behave like a live game as well. In other words, that the cards will be dealt in a random manner and that each card is equally likely.
2. In a live game you could (and would) never deal the cards according to the rules PokerStars now uses for triple draw.
3. Therefore, this rule change betrays the implied assurance that PokerStars accurately simulates live play.

I find Scott’s shrugging rationalization bothersome: “The theory is that no player would want one of their previous discards back…”

Well, no player wants to get dealt 7-2 in hold’em either. Maybe PokerStars would be more fun if no one ever got dealt offsuit trash hands.

Now one might quibble with my analogy in that removing offsuit trash hands would have a huge effect on the game while this alteration to the rules of triple draw is (admittedly) a pretty minor one. But I think the difference between the two is in degree, but not in kind. They are altering the deal to juice the game – albeit in an extremely minor and subtle way.

If you are tempted to ask, “Why not? What harm could it do?” I would ask, “Why?” If the change is minor and subtle, why make it at all? Why break that implied principle that online poker should simulate live poker for such a silly reason?

I see no reason to manipulate the deal in this way or any other for any reason. Making players happier is a terrible reason to manipulate the deal. Indeed, the rule change itself bothers me less than the justification of it. The same justification could be made to support other deal manipulations that could have effects the PokerStars people don’t fully comprehend… or that they do comprehend and benefit from. In my opinion it’s best not to open that can of worms at all.

A Doomswitch For Regulars?

PokerStars gets the finger in another 2+2 thread. This time some regular posters are suggesting that they and some of their friends who are also regular players experience significantly worse than expected results in all-in pots. Basically the thread raises the question that perhaps PokerStars has a built-in doomswitch designed to cut into the winrates of successful regular players by intentionally screwing them sometimes when it deals out cards in all-in pots.

I have seen no evidence thus far that convinces me in any way that PokerStars has implemented this policy.

I don’t really want to talk about the murmurings on 2+2 about PokerStars and regular players because I have no documentation or specific knowledge with which to pursue that topic. But I do want to talk in more general terms about deal manipulation.

There’s two things I’m pretty sure about:

1. Manipulating the deal in software is a nearly trivial task.
2. Poker rooms have both a short and long term financial incentive to tweak the outcomes of hands.

The first point is relatively simple. Any logic that you can think of regarding who should get what cards and how often and in what situations these tweaks should occur can be translated relatively easily into code. To implement most tweaks, it would require less than one day of work for just one developer. If the code needs to be hidden, that could take a little bit of doing, but there are numerous available ways to hide code that are clever and nearly undetectable.

Simply put, it’s entirely doable for any online poker room to “alter” its deal in any way it sees fit and also to hide those changes effectively from a standard, moderately thorough third party audit or inspection.

Can they? Yes, they can.

Would they? In my opinion, they might.

No-limit hold’em is the most popular online poker game right now, and online poker rooms are stuck spreading it whether they like it or not. So far it’s done well for poker rooms, but at the same time it’s not a perfect game from their perspective… assuming a perfect game would generate the maximum possible revenue for them over the medium-to-long term.

I’ve seen it suggested numerous times that online poker rooms would like to see the “fish” come out better than they do in a typical online no-limit game. The theory is that the longer the fish stay in action, the more tables will be going at a time, and therefore the more rake the cardroom will net.

I think the actual dynamics are a little more complex than that, but it seems a relatively easy conclusion that there are some tweaks that a cardroom could make to the game to improve its profitability. Whether that might be tweaking the game to favor fish or some other change, I think it’s essentially undeniable that cardrooms do have some financial interest in altering their games to improve profitability.

So they can do it, and doing it (intelligently) would probably make them more profitable. Sounds like something most businesses would jump at. Yet we online poker players generally assume that no poker rooms are, indeed, altering their deals. Why do we assume that?

Do we think the guys that own these sites would never stoop to something so dishonest? Probably some owners are honest enough, but obviously it’s laughable to assume that all owners of online poker rooms are cut from the most ethically upright cloth available.

Do we assume that the risk of getting caught wouldn’t be worth the extra profit? Many people do assume that, but I think the assumption is flawed for two reasons. First, greed commonly overcomes common sense. Even if it were true that the risk would be too risky, that’s not going to stop some people. Second, I don’t think it’s necessarily true that it’s too risky. If the tweaks were subtle enough, and possibly if they were varied from time to time, it could be very difficult to detect them to any reasonable level of confidence just by analyzing collected hand histories. It’s entirely possible they could do it for years and years and never really risk getting caught.

Bottom line. Do I think online poker is rigged? Not really at the moment. At least good players can still pull a very nice (and fairly consistent) winrate out of the games. But there’s probably some cheating and botting that cuts into any regular player’s winrate. And there may be some subtle deal manipulation on some sites that also cuts into regular players’ winrates as well. I really don’t know, and frankly no one else does either.

I do know that manipulating the deal is relatively easy to do, and I also know that it quite possibly could be profitable to cardrooms to do it. Do I trust them not to try? Frankly, I don’t.

I see no reason to strip naked and go running through the streets screaming, “OMG IT’S RIGGED!!!1″ But I think it’s entirely responsible for all regular players to examine the data periodically and try to uncover any irregularities. If you don’t find anything, great. But I won’t be too shocked if one day we find out that someone, somewhere, has been playing some tricks with the deck all these years.

• There’s a lot of money to be made on the river in the $1-$2 6-max no-limit games on Full Tilt. A lot of the regulars miss value bets a lot, and they fold too many hands to overbet shoves even if you aren’t really representing anything too plausible. So you can get a pretty good edge on them by value betting well and choosing your spots where they have a weak range to shove. To some extent the folding to shoves is an ok adjustment for the games because most of the players aren’t overbet shoving often enough as a bluff.
• I’ve installed the PokerTracker 3 Beta and have been using it. The HUD’s a little buggy, but the new features are really nice. The preflop 3-bet and fold to 3-bet stats in particular are immensely useful. It’s a lot easier to choose good spots to 3-bet and 4-bet light when you have those stats in the HUD. For some reason a lot of the 19/16-type regulars’ names run together in my head, and I had trouble remembering which ones liked to 3-bet light and which ones didn’t. The 3-bet stats make it a lot easier to remember.
• Stoxpoker has a new PLO coach, Ribbo, and his videos have inspired me to try to pick up the game. For the last week or so I’ve been playing in the $0.50-$1 6-max games on Full Tilt. I don’t know what a lot of the betting patterns mean, so I’ve gotten a little lost a few times. But it’s pretty clear that many of the other players (particularly at night) are really pretty terrible. For example, it’s common to see tables with 55% VPIPs. I don’t know much about PLO, but I know that can’t be right. So even though I suck I still feel kind of comfortable in the games. I can only imagine how juicy the games must be for someone who knows what they’re doing. If you’re a Stoxpoker member and have any interest in PLO, I definitely recommend checking out Ribbo’s videos.
• Oh, and don’t go too crazy with stone bluffs in those $0.50-$1 PLO games. It turns out that it’s actually pretty easy to make one pair when you start with four cards. And one pair is coincidentally some players’ requirements for stacking off.
• Apparently Leatherass pees in a bottle while he’s playing. I’m at a loss for words.
• If you’ve been living under a rock, you won’t know yet that the WSOP main event final table will be played in November, four months after the rest of the tournament. Interesting. When I heard, my mind immediately went to all the new and tempting ways the final table players could make secret deals, collude, and otherwise screw each other over. Then Elaine asked, “What if one of them dies in the interim?” An interesting question. Knowing poker players, the other final table contestants would naturally demand that the deceased be blinded off. Presumably this gimmick will help revive some new interest in TV poker. Honestly, I don’t care much either way because the chance that I’ll be at this year’s WSOP main event final table is zero. It’s hard for me to get too bent out of shape about tournament machinations. But if in some alternate universe I were to happen to be at that table… methinks it could be a really weird four months.
• Despite the final table shenanigans I’m definitely looking forward to the WSOP this year. I plan to play the cash games and have a lot of fun.

NETELLER is continuing to cooperate with the investigation being conducted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (“USAO”), under the advice of its legal advisers and in accordance with court orders in the Isle of Man. The Company is in discussions with the USAO for the purpose of resolving the investigation. The Company has advised the USAO that it will use its best efforts to resolve the investigation no later than 13 July 2007.

On 21 March 2007, the Company announced that it signed agreements with the USAO and Navigant Consulting, Inc. (“Navigant”) with respect to, among other things, developing a plan for the distribution of funds to US customers. Since then, in accordance with the agreements, the Company has worked with the USAO and Navigant to develop the plan. The Distribution Plan is now agreed upon, and the Company anticipates implementing the plan upon the resolution of the investigation.

It sounds more promising to me than any of the past statements, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Equity Calculators

Equity calculators are essential tools. They run simulations of all the possible board cards that can come, and they tell you the percentage of the time a certain hand (or range of hands) will win, tie, and lose. The two I use regularly are PokerStove, which is a full-featured client application (i.e., you have to download it and install it on your computer), and NPA Poker Tools, which is a web application I recently wrote. I personally use PokerStove for my writings more than any other poker software tool.

Poker Web Search

#1 Poker Search is a new poker search service that indexes only top-quality poker websites. There’s a lot of great poker information on the web, but sometimes it’s hard to find either because it’s on a site you don’t regularly visit or because the search functions on the sites don’t work well. #1 Poker Search helps you search poker websites and answer your poker questions more quickly and thoroughly.

Hand Converters

PokerHand is a sort of universal hand converter. You can submit a hand history of a hand you played online, and it will convert it into a pretty, human-readable format with card pictures and store it in its database. Then it gives you a permanent URL to your hand that you can post anywhere. So if you want to ask a question about a hand on a forum or blog, you can upload your hand to PokerHand and just post the URL it gives you. FlopTurnRiver also has a hand converter that will produce code for you to copy into forums, blogs, etc. Be careful and make sure you use the right format for the output, however, or your posting will look like a garbled mess of codes instead of a human-readable hand.

Online Hand Databases

SharkScope is a huge database of online tournament results. You can use it to scout out players you may not be familiar with, and it works on many of the major online sites. It tells you vital data about each player, including how many tournaments they’ve played and what their ROI (return on investment) has been. They give you 5 free searches per day, but if you want more, you have to pay.

Heads Up Displays

PokerAce HUD is a heads-up display for online play that uses your PokerTracker database. It’s not free, but it’s a terrific tool nonetheless. Ever wonder how people can play 8 tables at once? PokerAce HUD is one of the tricks these mega-tablers use. It displays PokerTracker data about your opponents next to their names inside the table window, so you see a quick summary of how each player plays right before your eyes. It’s fully configurable, so you can show whatever data you want wherever you want it.

Sit n Go Calculators

Sit n Go Power Tools is not free either, but it is simply essential if you seriously play one table tournaments. Sit-n-gos are very different from any other poker game because they pay so much to second and third place. Your goal isn’t to win the most chips, it’s to win the most money, and often that means trying to survive rather than gambling. Using equity calculators like PokerStove might lead you to the wrong conclusions in sit-n-gos because they will tell you what earns the most chips, not the most money. Sit n Go Power Tools runs the numbers for you, adjusting to the payout structure, and using it will improve your play tremendously.

NOTE: The equity calculators like NPA Tools, PokerStove, and Sit n Go Power Tools are all offline calculators. They aren’t intended to tell you how to play while you play (like the HUDs do), they are for analyzing hands away from the table.

Poker tools are sophisticated these days, and you should take advantage of them. Check out these tools today, and a few months from now you may wonder how you ever played without them.

• Gambling income is taxable in the US
• Lots of people aren’t declaring poker income on their returns
• The transactions are all logged, so there’s no plausible deniability if they look into your stuff
• They will start looking into online gambling transactions, since the IRS knows there’s money to be made

So I’m not going to beat any more dead horses for the moment. Instead, I’ll link to two people who will help beat them for me:

I recommend reading Matt Maroon’s post The Taxman Cometh and Russ Fox’s post Neteller, the DOJ, and the IRS. Russ, don’t even try to come after me for cribbing your post title. I added you. That’s fair use.

Both of these blogs are on my list of recommend blogs. Check them out.

The discussions between [Neteller's] legal advisers and the USAO are ongoing. [Neteller] is, under advice of its legal advisers, commencing production of documents and intends to cooperate with the USAO in its investigation.

I can only assume that “commencing production of documents” is a slight euphemism for “showing the USAO all of our books.” From this point forward, if you are an American who has used Neteller, I think you can assume that the Feds know exactly how much you’ve transferred to and from Neteller, and they know what your balance has been at all times.

That fact, of course, has tax implications. There are two major ones. First, if you have ever had at any time an aggregate of $10,000 in an offshore account (and I would assume Neteller qualifies), you must disclose that fact to the Treasury Department. If you have had $10,000 in the account, and you haven’t disclosed it, bad stuff can happen to you.

Second, of course, is that the Feds can now cross reference Neteller activity with tax returns and look for discrepancies. Audits are, no doubt, forthcoming.

Neteller’s second bombshell is that the Feds have currently seized some funds that were in transit between Neteller and US banks. But don’t sweat it, the guys at Neteller assure us that

To the best of [Neteller’s] knowledge, it believes that the amount of funds seized by the USAO or otherwise restricted by third parties does not exceed US$ 55 million.

Don’t worry. It’s only 55 bills. Plus the however much other money that hasn’t been seized, but has been instead frozen. It’s a big win for the Feds however you slice it.

Anyway, who knows what’s going to happen. The bottom line is that the Feds have snagged the biggest fish in the pond. The fish is going down without a fight. They are handing over their records and negotiating for return of the seized funds. I would guess that some funds will remain seized, and some funds will be released. And that the Feds will start going after some of the “high volume” players.

Find the best poker sites accepting americans

A few years ago, poker got really, really lucky, and a crazy idea called the World Poker Tour captured people’s imaginations and became the “new big thing.” (FWIW, at the time I really thought it was a crazy idea. I remember thinking it didn’t have a shot at more than a few episodes.) This roughly coincided with the rise of online poker, and the result was ridiculously enormous amounts of money ploughed into the poker economy.

It was inevitable from the very start that this huge surge of interest and cash would be temporary. Poker would not be the “new big thing” forever. Eventually, poker would go back to normal. Back to normal, but with a significantly higher baseline popularity than it had before the surge.

That’s where it’s headed – back to normal. I don’t care about the UIGEA or the feds or whatever. I mean I care, but they definitely aren’t going to “kill” poker. Before Dutch Boyd invented online poker… before Al Gore even invented the internet… poker (legal and illegal) was vibrant and played regularly throughout the country. People played for a living, and many made good livings. Millions enjoyed the game.

Ten years from now millions will still be playing poker – many more millions than were playing poker ten years ago. You will always have ample access to regular poker games. It’s true, if you were 12-tabling the $5-$10 games on Party, then your gravy train may soon be permanently derailed. But, quite frankly, that was gonna happen whether the feds got involved or not. The excesses of the online poker bubble created some really bizarre expectations in many players’ minds of what they could and should make for hourly rates.

We’re headed eventually back to normal poker. You’ll be able to play live. And likely you’ll also be able to play online as well. If you crave regular poker games, you’ll be able to find them in one year, in two years, in five years, in ten years, and probably in fifty years also. They’ll be good, loose, soft games that you can make a living playing (if you want). So don’t sweat the day-to-day stuff so much. Just chalk all the changes we’ll see over the next year up to variance. Eventually everything will be back on track.