So, what's new???

Well, I was down in the dumps a little, crashing at a friends without a job and what happens?

Another friend offers me a good deal that I can't possibly deny.

I'm given a chance to have no expenses in my home and play poker part time. In return I have to play very seriously, my best, and I split any profits beyond the cost of my expenses with my friend/landlord/employer. If I'm behind in a given month, it rolls over into the next month. It's more cmplicated that this brief description, and we signed a contract.

Should be a very good situation. I can make some money, not stress about expenses, use a shared bankroll instead of my own, and work another job at the same time. Could be just what I need to get back in the black. We're doing this for a year minimum, extreme events notwithstanding.

It's nice to have poker skills to fall back upon and friends that want to help and enjoy the idea of living vicariously through my poker escapades.

I'm going to see if I can get into another big tournament like I did in 2005 in the Main Event.



Additionally, there's been another big poker scandal. It appears someone at Absolute Poker had total access to a player's hands in a tournament via an observer, and the observer looks a lot like an account held by the owner of the company. Ethics violations, galore. It's a little byzantine to read through it all, but I assure you, the site I refer you to is a great poker site with a lot of very bright people and they don't tend to accept the ramblings of madmen or scam artists as having much veracity.

Here's a link:

First Link

Fascinating story of insider cheating in online poker:
cheating
more cheating
more cheating still

This graph of players' river aggression is a great piece of evidence.
Note the single outlying point.



Those that are very into math know that outlier points indicate situations far outside the natural pattern. In this case, the poker player in question made far too many perfect plays (plays you would make if you knew exactly what your opponent had) on the river when he couldn't possibly be beaten for it to be normal.

In a live game, this sort of play would be more plausible. Online, with largely absent tells, it's almost certainly cheating.

Sklansky, in his book Getting the Best of It, explains the situation well. Basically, if you say, it's 1 million to one your friend is cheating, and the chances of his actions spontaneously occuring are 10 million to one, the chances are 10:1 that your friend is cheating.

The math doesn't usually work out so cleanly in real life, but it's still somewhat applicable to this situation. With a single outlying point far beyond any normal poker play, one has to move to an assumption of cheating if the pattern is too dramatic, as it appears to be in this case.