That is the story I have written for Ron in my head. I know he ran out of money. I know his wife left him. I know he posted on internet forums about all the kinky things he was up to with Thai hookers. I know he has confessed to this murder. I don't know anything else. I have no idea how he felt, or feels, about anything.posted by mazola at 9:05 AM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]
Phuket City Police Superintendent Wanchai Ekpornpit told reporters after the press conference that several factors appeared to have contributed to Mr Fanelli’s mental state at the time of the stabbing: he was drunk; his Thai wife had left him and taken their young child back to her native Maha Sarakham province in Isarn. He had also recently lost his Internet connection, he noted.Heavens to Betsy, not the internet connection!
I am having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that these comments represent "the online poker playing community". I imagine that there are vast numbers of online poker players, some of whom have found kindred spirits in a handful of online forums.BBV4L (the forum linked to) is definately one of the lowest common denominator spots in the online poker world. There are many who post on 2+2 who find much of its content offensive and many others who avoid 2+2 altogether. I read it from time to time to keep up with what is going on, but I don't feel that it speaks to me or my friends. There is a kind of unpleasant frat house vibe on many poker forums because many successful online players are young males who dropped out of school and have money and no adult supervision and live a kind of young adult Animal Farm kind of life.
Heavens to Betsy, not the internet connection!If you remember that he is a poker player, that is in fact a big deal and could be read as "he just lost his job" instead of just lost his ability to be a jackass on BBV4L.
If you make your living off of online poker, you are almost guaranteed an asshole, since you make your living by taking money from other people without providing any sort of service to them. They have to be less intelligent than you are in order for you to take their money, so it breeds a feeling of superiority and contempt for people in general.I'd consider making smug statements about people you apparently have never met a better predictor than playing online poker. The asshole:nice guy ratio is higher in poker than many other fields of endeavor, but there are a lot of fascinating and wonderful people who make their living that way. I'm not even defending myself here because I have a day job.
In fact, if you really were as smart as you think you are, you could live off of table poker in a first-world country.Two of the three of the people I know who currently live in Thailand make more than 250k a year -- they choose to live where the living is cheap and the weather is great. I'm not sure that earning your living sitting on the beach with your laptop proves you aren't very smart.
The fact that twoplustwo refuses to let their members discuss these events as well as its own role in the atmosphere of assholism is, in my opinion, shameful to the whole community.This. A thousand times this. Of course, they have a few other shameful episodes in the past as well. Sklansky's role in the Brandi thing is not exactly the stuff self-promotion is made of either. I guess in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I'm a moderator at a much smaller, but much nicer poker forum. Its like a brown trout convention at MeFi today.
My brother plays poker online for play money. He is doing it for entertainment, and the people who play with him are doing it for entertainment. When you play for real money, it is no longer about entertainment, it is about hurting other people for your own benefit.This is self-contradictory. Either poker has entertainment value or it does not. In one case you are risking money and in another you are not, but that doesn't change whether the game is entertaining or not. There are groups of people who play poker for money amongst themselves for decades who apparently find it entertaining as hell. People as diverse as Mark Twain and David Mamet have written about the entertainment value of poker. At some point people might find that the amount they lose exceeds the entertainment value received, but that figure is probably at different points for different folks. Claiming that the entertainment value immediately vanishes when you play for money is transparently nonsense.
Poker is all about lying. If you play poker, you are a liar. If you play well, you are a good liar.I realize that you may not believe this due to my highly advanced skills at deception, but this is a popular misconception about poker. Poker is not primarily about deception or bluffing. Many casual players believe that it is, but they are wrong. Those of us whose play is grounded in cold-hearted mathematical calculation will end up with the money most of the time.
Bets at the track are made between the punter and a bookmaker. Bookmakers cover both sides of the bet - that is, the volume of winning bets should equal the volume of losing bets. So your hypothetical race track gambler isn't taking money from anyone.That isn't how parimutual betting works. All the bettors money goes into a pool, the house takes a cut and the winners share the money generated by the losers minus the house cut. The winners are taking the money directly from the losers minus a handling fee (or tax, I guess if the government is running the pool).
You cannot control other people's behaviour, and nor are you expected to, but you can control your own. And you are essentially playing the part of a drug dealer with the excuse that if you didn't sell the crack, someone else would, and it's hard to tell the addicts from the hobbyists.I'm not sure how I could be the dealer in your analogy. I'm more like a guy who buys the addict's stuff on craigslist so that they can keep buying. Not exactly admirable, but not quite the same as selling them the drugs. But I would agree that arguing from analogy is not helpful. Essentially, I consider myself a third-party beneficiary of their addiction and do not regard myself as having a responsibility to them. Even if I could identify the addicts, I'm having difficulty understanding what you would hold as the morallly correct action -- should I then move to a table with no addicts? If we agreed that my opponents were primarily gambling addicts who couldn't afford to lose, I would agree that I would be obligated to quit. I just don't think that is the case.
the fact you're even questioning the basic moral framework of something that is obviously a large part of your identity and perhaps livelihood is genuinely admirable, and I hope you continue to reflect on itI don't know that I agree that it is a large part of my identity and I could probably find this a bit condescending, but I choose to imagine that you meant it kindly. Ironically, as I have attained greater success in poker, I have become less interested in it. I'll probably play at my twice-monthly homegame until I die, but my live and online play is dwindling to nothing these days. I'm used to questioning my basic moral framework since my day job is as an senior executive (Marxist doubts) for a massive defense contractor (issues galore!) while being an heart a pacifist liberal. Clearly I'm pretty good at rationalizing (and/or willing to sell my soul to the highest bidder).
most money gambled (in Australia, and I've seen no data to suggest this is different from the world over, certainly not in Asia at any rate) is coming from problem gamblers with a gambling addiction.I'm extremely sceptical of such a conclusion. I've got serious doubts as to how one would even construct a study to come up with meaningful results. The best work I'm aware of in this area is the massive study done by the British Gambling Commission which concluded that 68% of the British public had gambled and 0.6% of the public were identified by the DSM-IV as problem gamblers. There is also some data that shows that problem gamblers favor games with immediate win/loss results like blackjack, craps or roulette. Poker doesn't provide the same rush, because it takes longer. In fact, most winning players refer to it as "grinding" which better reflects what it is like that some excitement filled rush.
I can see where you're coming from in regards to your other point - and you're right in that problem gamblers are a tiny proportion of overall gamblers - a bit over 1.5% in Australia. However, 5 out of every six dollars gambled comes from them because they gamble so much more more.The question is how much those people play poker, compared to other gambling outlets.
I can see where you're coming from in regards to your other point - and you're right in that problem gamblers are a tiny proportion of overall gamblers - a bit over 1.5% in Australia. However, 5 out of every six dollars gambled comes from them because they gamble so much more more.I've read the complete South Australian Gambling Prevalence Report and can find nothing in there that supports this conclusion. I also had a quick scan of several of the executive summaries of the other reports and they don't appear to have that claim either. In fact, the 2007 Australasian gambling review says the following "Expenditure by problem gamblers is estimated to make up a third of total gambling expenditure." which would appear to be completely at odds with your 5 out of every 6 dollars figure and as far as I can tell is still in the category of pulling numbers out of their butt (see the "estimated" bit).
I'm genuinely curious if professional poker players are any less likely to be gambling addicts.I don't want to tell too many tales out of school, but the vast majority of the old school players that you know from TV have a tendency to gamble on inherently -EV casino games, especially craps, which are certain money losers in the long run. Even Barry, who I love as a person, risks what I would consider to unwise amounts at the craps table. I've personally seen him with upwards of 250k on the craps table before. Some famous players are perpetually broke (like have trouble making the rent broke) due to problems with craps. That is another problem with the whole "problem gambler" thing. By many standards Phil Ivey is a problem gambler. I'd be shocked if his craps losses aren't well north of $1 million. On the other hand, every time I've played in a tourney with him he has crushed me and I wouldn't ever sit with him in a cash game. He may be a problem gambler, but there is no one on the planet who is a better poker player. Many younger players seem to be able to avoid the tables, but time will tell.
It comes from the desire for something for nothingAs the man said, it is a hard way to make an easy living. There is no one who plays at the levels I play (and I'd say I'm a high middle-stakes player) that hasn't invested hundreds, probably thousands of hours in study and practice and review. Like most fields of endeavor on the planet, success is primarily a result of hard work and intelligence.
My moral disdain is reserved for professional players. The only way you could make a living at poker is to seek out weaker players and victimize them, since if you played with equals, you wouldn't be making a living.Obviously, most of this is your personal moral code and therefore not subject to debate, but your second sentence is fairly naive. Particularly in tourney play, you may play in an event that has 20,000 entrants, but you will only personally face a tiny fraction of them even if you win the thing. Most of them get eliminated on tables far away from you. Their collective weaknesses are the source of your profit, but you don't seek them out or ever see most of them. They just contribute to the prize pool.
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posted by Astro Zombie at 8:54 AM on September 20, 2010 [5 favorites]