Poker Perambulation

It is the weekend so I tend toward other topics in ‘Weekenders’. I want to talk about the Internet and where it is trending. Your ISP relationship is or should be a love:hate relationship and you’d be wise to ratchet up the hate side. (I talk about tournament play in the ADDENDUM which will let you bypass the first part if you find it uninteresting.)

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Westmore 2072 was how “Little Ken” could talk to his grandma. I’d pick up the phone and say those words and the nice operator lady would connect our phone with hers. As the system went to dial service, it was still the same idea but an electromechanical switch. The intelligence to provide phone service has always been at a remote location. The Internet is the diametric opposite or at least that is what was envisioned. Intelligence resides at the edges. All the Internet does is provide us with the path to equally smart location where we want to go.

Because we’ve grown used to the hand holding of our old technology, we don’t tend to think beyond it. Most people look at www.pokerworks.com as the equivalent of Westmore 2072. That is true in its most simplistic form. Cable TV tricks us in the same manner. Like the phone company, it retains all control of our access to its service. In our programmed state, the fact we are getting all those channels seems amazing and worth the whorehouse fees they charge.

Broadband service is available from three basic sources: DSL, FIOS, and Cable. (Radio signal service is more in the future than a current option for most.) It is in the megabit per second range. This service allows us to do all the things that our provider sells us in other services. We can attach VOIP telephones and talk to the world for a fraction of the cost of a traditional local/long-distance phone service. We can download every show that was on TV, available on DVD at the Walmart –we can even get the pay-per-view option for the final table of the WSOP. Most of that is via the pirate sites or sites like Itunes pay service. However we might decide to see Jean Paul Belond’s man tits, we can do it via the Internet now.

The way we are programmed to watch Survivor-China is to turn on our TV and watch for free. Or we can Tivo or use our media center TV to record it and watch when we wish to do so. Or we can go to Itune and blow $1.99 to download it. Or we can go to Piratesbay.com and cheat. This is the same for all those cable channels which aren’t part of the free broadcast spectrum. We don’t differentiate.

Internet packets are democratic. They don’t care if the packets they bring to and carry from your computer carry a conversation with grandma or stolen music or videos or movies or or or. That terrifies traditional technologies. Nowhere is that more obvious than with the record industry. They have lost control of their product to the Internet. It was never an efficient business. It functioned as a dictatorship. It ruled the artist and listener options. As the worst provider of services, it is the first to suffer.

Consider your cable/phone/internet providers. That line is blurring. All are attempting to provide this package of services to you. There business plan is for you to pay through the nose for everything that you can illegally or legally get for far less cost. They are attempting to control that with their Net 2.0 initiatives. It won’t work but they are trying.

Nowhere is it more obvious than with Verizon’s FIOS service. It allocates broadband access to your home that is far beyond the the actual service they sell you. Even so it is in the megabit category and represent 1% of the bandwidth being brought into each home. They are reserving 99% of the product for generating other profit. FIOS is a very costly project. The copper wire to your program carried similar investments in its day. That was such a huge profit over time that the government finally stepped in and deregulated the industry.

We are at a point not far removed from Mr. Bell and his invention. The cable and phone companies have the same basic business plan that created Bell Systems. They wish to define how you use that system in every aspect. They tell you they are entitled and they are. But are they entitled to the degree they demand? We see that all that they provide can be duplicated using Internet packets with the rudimentary applications available to us today. We can say, OK it is your ball and I will give you full control or we can say, “No, we need to reach a middle ground that services my need in an affordable manner.” Are you interested in paying for the same crappy cable shows that repeat and repeat that you never wanted to watch to begin with? You are paying for that in the current business model. And, because you are forced to do that, there is little reason for the vendors to improve.

In the past our options were limited and information difficult to obtain. We watched what the evening news provided or we got from other traditional media. But, the Internet let the cat out of the bag. We can find information that interests us 24/7. Besides a poker blog we can get blogs of every stripe. We can look at raw information from a variety of sources and go beyond the editorial blogs and media traditions. The cat is out of the bag. Technology has placed the options in the end users hands.

The future holds a lot of interest to me. I’d really have liked to have been around to see how it all plays out. I’m sure to see a portion of it but there will be so much beyond that and I am jealous. Will we throw off the balls and chains of of tradition and inertia and move to a much better place? I am really curious.

ADDENDUM:
I played a tournament late yesterday on Ultimate Bet. I have played a ton of tournaments on that site. For a year or so I’d log 100+ hours a month. It has some of the best blind structuring available. It isn’t until the second hour that the blinds reach 50-100. And blinds are kept under some control when in the middle of the second hour an ante structure starts alternating with the blind increases.

The thing that has changed is the aggression. There were a lot of early moves using aggressive but not overly aggressive betting. People tended to contrinue promoting their hand in the subsequent betting. A lot of hands were being shown down with even less than TPTK type hands.

In the past, it was easier to separate out the players. You had the donk/all-ins at the bottom of the feeding chain and the LAG that would try to control the table. They were subject to reads. You could fairly well chart who you were willing to play with what. Appearance wise these days, that gotten harder. The donkeys are still braying but they’re harder to identify. The starting aggression seems to be at where it used to be approaching the ante stage.

I can’t swear this is a broad trend. Tables have certainly had a variability that ran the gamut. I saw tables like that happen from the start. What is unusual as that as I was moved the play remained fairly consistently biased toward aggressive play that didn’t come with the good reads of the past. That is pretty unusual but not an overly remarkable happening.

I didn’t get cards that were cards that gave a lot of late confidence. My one occurrence of trips was a losing hand. I played yo-yo far more than I’d hoped. I felt forced to bet weaker hands like they were stronger. Playing a more TAG type play was going to require far better cards than is typical and even reason blind increases start to foretell the future.

I did last into the second hour. I didn’t get bored – as can happen in tournaments. The tournament was a guarantee and looked like it might have some overlay. But, it ended up full with pretty good size list of alternates waiting for a seat. It was also a tournament with a small bounty. Some might have been playing that harder than is advisable. My one shot at one left the other guy with 40 stinkin’ chips.

All in all, I found it a fun tournament. It made me do more thinking than was normal in the past. You couldn’t get by long with a Level-1 game. Next time I’m hoping to see some better cards. But, they weren’t hideous on the whole; just more infrequent than most would expect. The RNG hasn’t been a great friend of late.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 6:01 am and is filed under Journal, Off Topic, Tournaments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.