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The Big Deal - Why is everyone so jazzed about poker?
Published: 0000-00-00
 by Molly Kincaid
As expected, the room is filled with men. OK, I’m not the only woman here, but the other two have obviously been dragged in by their boyfriends. It’s Monday night at Kingston Alley, for which the bar section has been transformed into a low-grade casino with makeshift green felt coverings over the dining tables. Most of the menfolk are milling around and shooting the shit. Many of them know each other, and they do that guy thing where they call each other by their last names, “Hey, Johnson, you’re goin’ down, buddy,” for example. Then a young man with a mustache and a black vest, just like the dealers on TV, yells that it’s time to start, and everyone lumbers over to his assigned tables. Cute waitresses ask the men if they want beers. Domestic bottles are two bucks tonight.
Throughout the first few hands, everyone clicks his chips together, rippling them lackadaisically. No one seems particularly excited to be here. Sweat beads slide down Miller Light bottles but none appear on palms. For some reason, around 30 people are congregated here by their own free will, so there must be something fun or thrilling about it. Maybe it’s just an excuse to leave the wife at home for a few hours. Or maybe it’s a good way to meet people. There’s no money on the line, so it’s not the chance of winning moolah that’s inspired this gathering. Perhaps the next few hours will tell what brings people here, and to Vegas, Cherokee, N.C. or Tunica, Miss., and what possesses people to sit at computers for hours just clicking away on online poker sites. Maybe the night will reveal the mysterious and powerful draw of poker.
Texas Hold ‘Em is the game of choice these days. Since I grew up playing Five Card Draw, it feels very uncomfortable “holding ‘em” at first, because I have only two cards in my hand. Very disconcerting. The point system is the same here; you want a flush or a full house or two pair and so on, but you don’t know what’s lurking on the other side of those ominous cards that will determine your hand—at least not until you’ve committed yourself with anywhere from $100 to $1,000 or so worth of chips. I pretty much fold every hand for the first hour.
The guys don’t find betting at all daunting. They toss in the black $1,000 chips like it’s no biggie and don’t even flinch when they “go all in,” putting all of their chips on the line in one go. The chip piles shrink or tower around the table from hand to hand. One heavy-set young guy smokes cigarettes at 10-minute intervals and ashes on the patio, apologizing for the smoke intermittently, as if it weren’t a requisite element in my romanticized vision of a heated poker game. Perhaps cigars would be more authentic, though.
One guy at the table is “the talker.” You know him. He’s the one who calls the waitresses “sweetie” and gets away with it because he has a country-boy charm; he’s the embodiment of the guy romancing the girl with “one bottle o’ wine and two Dixie cups” in that Kenny Chesney song. He also probably spits dip into Mountain Dew bottles. He gives lots of helpful hints as he’s munching on his fried cheese sticks and even fancies himself something of a mystic. “I can call cards, they call me the Rain Man,” he crows. Later, he does call a pocket pair of queens residing in the hand of an opponent, but it’s not quite as amazing as the toothpick trick Dustin Hoffman pulled in the diner.
Since this is my first time playing hold ‘em, though, it’s very helpful to have the talker at my table. Not only does he nudge me when it’s my turn, he also explains common poker superstitions as if they are honest-to-God truths. “When you play for a while, particular hands will jinx you,” he says. “Like me, I hate ace, queen. I usually fold now when I get ace, queen because I’ve lost so many times with it.”
For those unfamiliar with Texas Hold ‘Em, an ace, queen would generally be considered a good hand, because if another ace or queen gets turned, you would have a strong pair. So his comment seems like either extreme paranoia or blown smoke. But he loses one of the next few hands with an ace and a queen. He kicks himself for having bet on it. Duped by ace, queen once again.
The games at Kingston Alley, as well as other bars around Knoxville—like Oskie’s, Murphy’s, Buffalo Wild Wings and Michael’s—are organized by the National Pub Poker League. How it works is the winner of each poker night gets a chance to go to the regional competitions, which are held quarterly. Then, the winner of regionals gets an expenses-paid trip to Vegas to compete for a million-dollar prize in the nationals.
Las Vegas is a poker-player’s Holy Land. While most tourists go to play nickel slots and sip watered-down Mai Tais, poker players go to chase down the “new American Dream.” Brady Goodman, an avid Knoxville poker player and host of “Ante Up!” a radio talk show about poker, started a recent show with the statement, “No offense to my guests, but I wish I was in Vegas! I wish I was in Vegas!” Instead, he does the next best thing: clicking away on online poker sites and playing home games with friends. He says he usually logs about 25 to 30 hours a week.
Goodman’s radio show features some general poker news about what’s going on at tournaments, changes in legality, and poker strategy. He’s had some pretty famous guests, including two-time WSOP champ Jennifer Harman and poker writers Alan Schoonmaker and David Slanksy. The show is broadcast on the Horne Radio Network on Mondays from 6 to 8 p.m. (call letters are 1400 AM and 850 WKVL). Goodman also heads up a one-day “poker camp” on Sept. 17, with many guest speakers on hand to talk about everything from strategy to the best poker vacation spots.
The whole poker craze seems to be a reaction to the World Series of Poker’s appearance on the small screen a few years ago, and now “celebrity poker” has garnered even more interest. Knoxvillian Chris Moneymaker inspired some with his WSOP win, having been catapulted there after learning how to play on Internet sites. “Moneymaker and his Cinderella run to win the WSOP has gotten lots of people dreaming big,” says Goodman. “The fact that any regular cat with an Internet connection and six bucks can turn that into millions—it’s become the new American Dream.”
Americans are undeniably lazy, so it’s really no surprise that a game that’s easy to pick up and that can supposedly garner easy money would appeal to us. Still, most players insist that the skills involved have to be honed just like golf or chess. But if you just want to play for fun, says Goodman, “Poker is so easy to play that nobody’s really excluded from it.”
Since gambling is illegal in Tennessee, and public poker tournaments are sans money, one might wonder why they are so popular. The point of poker is to win money, right? It turns out there are lots of reasons people are drawn to the game of chance. “I like it because it’s something social that I can do to meet people, but it’s also that adrenaline rush of having the cards in your hand,” says Kelly Steely, a nurse at Fort Sanders Hospital who attends several Pub Poker nights a week.
Knoxville’s bar poker scene may be male dominated, but Steely and her female poker buddies are anything but intimidated. “The majority of other players are definitely guys. I’d say it’s about a 1-to-10 ratio,” she says. “Men don’t think women know how to play the game, so I definitely work that. They think they are at an advantage because they are playing with girls.” She admits to feigning naivete to throw the guys off every once in a while.
Since bar poker has become popular, there has been a resurgence of home games as well. Though technically illegal if money is involved, not a lot of home games are broken up by the police. On one of Goodman’s radio shows, Assistant District Attorney Del Holley estimated that officers see only about three or four poker charges a month, and most of the offenders are caught only because there’s some other shady dealings going on at the house that bring the police in. Holley also notes that poker charges are only misdemeanors, regardless of the stakes, so a $10,000 bet would fetch the same slap on the wrist as a $5 one.
The regulations on “poker paraphernalia” like cards and chips resemble those on marijuana accoutrements. Just as pipes and bongs can be used for tobacco, cards are hardly incriminating as they can also be used to play Go Fish with grandma. “Gambling is illegal in Tennessee, but that’s tough to enforce,” says Goodman. “The laws are pretty ambiguous, and all of us are just crossing our fingers that nobody gets their panties in a wad.”
Online poker is a relatively new outlet for players, and with it comes some legal issues. Because many online companies are run outside the United States, says Goodman, the government can’t regulate or tax them. “The Department of Justice is basically saying that online poker is illegal, but they’re not prosecuting anybody,” says Goodman.
Obviously, most players would favor the legalization of gambling in Tennessee. Anthony Phillips, who runs several Pub Poker nights in Knoxville, often travels with his boss to play poker in Mississippi, North Carolina and Alabama. Does he want to see casinos in Tennessee? “Absolutely. I think it would help Tennessee because people from around here go out-of-state to play. That’s money that the state could be bringing in,” he says. “You see how well the lottery has done, and how it has helped students pay for school.”
While Goodman doesn’t praise the lotto in so many words, he does echo the irony of its legality in a state where all other forms of gambling are illegal. “The lottery is a tax on people that are bad at math,” he says. “How is it OK for the state to roll up all this money on a game of chance, and I can’t sit down and win some money at a game of skill?”
Aside from its legality woes, poker does suffer from another stigma: addiction. Like any vice, playing the odds in excess can be debilitating, and some people become true gambling addicts. Even players at the money-free Pub Poker warn, “Watch out. It’s addictive.”
Steely admits that her non-poker friends complain that she plays too much, and that it’s hard to resist the game at times. “I mean, there is a desire and a craving to play. It is hard to say no,” she says. “But I think of addiction as a bad thing, and this is not a bad thing.”
Later in the evening at Kingston Alley, players have dwindled to just four tables, and, due to my extremely conservative playing during the first hour, and a few lucky turns in the second, I am amazingly still in the game. The mood has definitely shifted. No longer do fingers around the table drum the felt in boredom. Now they tap restlessly in a mix of pleasure and panic. Chips have changed hands countless times, but a twinge of anticipation comes every time those two cards appear in all their face-down mystery. While Internet poker may be good for scoring quick cash, or losing it, bar poker is definitely all about the rush.
So far, I’ve worked up the nerve to bet on a few hands, losing and winning a couple meager pots. Then it happens. I peek under the corners of my two cards to see that they’re both aces. As a beginner, I get pretty excited to get dealt a pocket pair of aces. Going “all in” seems like a darn good idea because, what the hell? Plus, what are the chances anyone’s going to beat that? After a couple of rounds, I nonchalantly slide the rest of my 2,000 chips into the center of the fuzzy green table. It feels funny having no chips to fiddle with. The only other remaining player flips his hand. Two kings and another on the table. Duped by pocket aces.
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On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Bot
Published: 2005-08-26
 In the booming world of online poker, anyone can win. Especially with an autoplaying robot ace in the hole. Are you in, human?
By David KushnerPage
It's late one Wednesday afternoon, and CptPokr is logged on to PartyPoker.com and ready to play. Onscreen, the captain exudes a certain brash charisma - broad shoulders, immaculate brown hair, restless animatronic eyes. He looks like he should be playing synth in Kraftwerk. Instead, he is seated at a virtual table with nine other avatars, wagering on limit Texas hold 'em.
There's plenty at stake. An estimated 1.8 million gamblers around the world ante up for online poker every month. Last year, poker sites raked in an estimated $1.4 billion, an amount expected to double in 2005.
Ever since the aptly named accountant Chris Moneymaker parlayed a $40 Internet tournament buy-in into a $2.5 million championship at the World Series of Poker in 2003, card shark wannabes have been chasing their fantasies onto the Net. Some even quit their day jobs and try to make a living at online poker. And why not? This shadowy world is driven by no less a force than the great American dream. As the tournament's motto goes, "Anyone can win." There's one problem, though, as CptPokr is about to demonstrate: The rules of the game are different online.
CptPokr is a robot. Unlike the other icons at the table, there is no human placing his bets and playing his cards. He is controlled by WinHoldEm, the first commercially available autoplaying poker software. Seat him at the table and he will apply strategy gleaned from decades of research. While carbon-based players munch Ding Dongs, yawn, guzzle beer, reply to email, take phone calls, and chat on IM, CptPokr (a pseudonym) is running the numbers so it will know, statistically, when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
Smart, skilled players are rewarded in the long run, especially online, where there are plenty of beginners who would never have the nerve to sit down at a real table. But WinHoldEm isn't just smart, it's a machine. Set it to run on autopilot and it wins real money while you sleep. Flick on Team mode and you can collude with other humans running WinHoldEm at the table.
For years, there has been chatter among online players about the coming poker bot infestation. WinHoldEm is turning those rumors into reality, and that is a serious problem for the online gambling business. Players come online seeking a "fair" shot - a contest against other humans, not robots. But an invasion of bots implies a fixed game (even though, like their mortal counterparts, they can and do lose if their hands are bad enough or opponents good enough). So the poker sites loudly proclaim that automated play is no big deal. At the same time, they are fighting back by quietly scanning for and eliminating suspicious accounts. "We're making sure we never have bots on our site," says PartyPoker marketing director Vikrant Bhargava.
That's an impossible promise to keep, says Ray E. Bornert II, WinHoldEm's elusive creator. He's trying to flood the online world with his bot - and make a killing in the process. Bornert offers an elaborate justification for what many view as outright cheating: Online poker is already rife with computer-assisted card sharks and - thanks to him - a growing number of outright bots. Players should get wise and arm themselves with the best bot available, which is, of course, WinHoldEm.
There's a quiet knock at the door of a hotel room in Atlanta. It's Bornert. A stocky, wide-faced 43-year-old with a neat goatee and nervous manner, he's carrying a router in a plastic bag. To demonstrate his software, he insists on meeting here in private, several miles from his office. He doesn't want anyone from the poker business to know where he is. "Our guard is constantly up," he says.
For Bornert, a former evangelical student, outsmarting the poker sites is not just a mission, it's a market. A suite of WinHoldEm programs is available for download at www.winholdem.net. For $25, you get a bare-bones setup: run-of-the-mill poker-hand analysis software. For $200, you can buy the full package: a one-year subscription to the team edition, which includes the autoplaying bot and a card-sharing module that allows multiple players to communicate during a game. Bornert won't say how many customers he has; he'll admit only that he makes a living selling WinHoldEm.
For customers, buying the bot is just a starting point. The program works something like a music equalizer, but instead of adjusting bass and treble, you tweak betting strategies - how to play a pair of fives early in the game, for example, or when to fold cards that might look promising to a beginner. Most users customize the software by inputting a batch of rules, called a formula set. Bot aficionados scour poker manuals and online forums to cull the best strategies. They swap formula sets like gamers swap mods. "This is from Sklansky's Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, pages 122-133," reads a typical note posted to the WinHoldEm forums.
Bornert isn't claiming he can create millionaires. Bots are subject to the same cold streaks as real players. But, unlike humans, the machines play with relentless cunning and tireless discipline, raking in small pots from low-limit tables where less-experienced opponents hang out. Traditionalists in the poker chat rooms scorn Bornert. "You are a pathetic immoral piece of shit loser," reads a recent post, "completely devoid of morals and ethics."
He hardly cares. Bornert insists that he's bringing to light the hypocrisy of the gambling sites. It's an unlikely role for a guy who grew up in Dallas and Phoenix as a self-described "geek jock" playing football and studying biblical history. "I'd always been taught gambling was evil," he says. He went on to Oral Roberts University, where he became fascinated with cards after seeing a late-night infomercial for a blackjack scheme.
Bornert was pursuing a degree in computer science, and the ad intrigued him. He set up some simulations to test the card-counting technique and found that a player could, in fact, get the edge. That's when a light went on: Blackjack wasn't really gambling after all. With enough smarts, a player could master it and win. "No one could say I was addicted to a losing game," Bornert says. "It was beatable." After seven consecutive profitable trips to Vegas, Bornert got hooked on winning.
As the poker boom hit the Net, Bornert found himself working for the house. He took a job as a senior systems engineer with RealTime Gaming, an Atlanta-based developer of online casino software. While working on blackjack software in 2001, he started tinkering with his own card-analysis software on the side. Such programs - Poker Tracker, Poker Edge, Holdem Winner - have since become an acceptable and indispensable part of the scene. They're used like calculators to keep tabs on shifting stats. It didn't take long for Bornert to make the next logical connection - what he calls the "golden goose" of online poker. Rather than consult card-analysis software while playing, why not hook up the software directly to the game?
Bornert had no ethical qualms about creating a poker bot. The way he saw it, the poker sites were duping people into believing that a game of hold 'em online was as safe and secure as one at any casino in Vegas. "The reality is that the game changed the moment it moved to the Internet," Bornert says. Bots and bot-aided collusion were inevitable. Rather than seduce anyone into thinking such things didn't exist, Bornert had another notion: Put the power in the players' hands. By democratizing computer-assisted firepower, he'd make it part of the competition. "It's like football - if you don't wear a helmet and pads, you're going to get hurt," he says. "A poker bot is your equipment." And if that is considered unethical, then so be it. "I'd rather be unethical than be a victim," he says. "This is intentional civil disobedience."
In 2003, Bornert quit his job at RealTime Gaming and devoted himself to writing WinHoldEm. He quickly had a working prototype, which serves as the template for the bot he sells today. When a user boots up the software and logs on for a game, all the players' cards and chips are represented onscreen. WinHoldEm first scans the screen for information. The data is put into memory and analyzed according to the player's formula set. Each action - calling, raising, going all-in - is controlled by a series of yes-no formulas.
By fall, Bornert was ready to test his software. He logged on to a $5-limit hold 'em tournament on Paradise Poker and watched the program go. A crucial element of the test was to see how long the application could stay online without being detected. Eventually, Bornert went to bed - but the bot didn't. The next morning when he checked his computer, WinHoldEm had won. It wasn't a lot of money, only $30, but it proved a point. "I almost shed tears," he recalls. "I know what Dr. Frankenstein felt like. It was a totally intoxicating experience."
On Super Bowl Sunday 2004, Bornert began offering his program online. It didn't take long for the poker sites to catch on and fight back. Within weeks, they were scanning games to see if anyone was running WinHoldEm, and users were getting booted off poker sites before they could cash out. "Players no longer feel comfortable if they think they're playing a computer," says Scott Wilson, director of operations for Paradise Poker. "You would lose credibility fast if they felt your environment wasn't human-to-human."
Players themselves also took steps against the bots, using a site's chat function to smoke out the software. Moneymaker likes to engage players in small talk between hands. "Poker bots can't make conversation," he says. Meanwhile, bot users started developing their own counter-countermeasures, like limiting their time at any one table to minimize the appearance that a relentless machine is involved. And they can control their bots from a remote computer to evade detection by poker sites that scan for WinHoldEm on a hard drive.
The battle goes beyond Bornert's app. Other bots are appearing on the scene - including some that were never intended for online play. For the past 14 years, computer scientists at the University of Alberta Games Group have been building the poker version of Deep Blue: a program that can beat a top player, just as IBM's bot trumped Garry Kasparov in chess. "I'd love to be there when the computer raises the stakes by $100,000," says UA's Jonathan Schaeffer. "I want to see the bead of perspiration going down the human opponent's forehead. That's my dream."
There's reason to sweat even now. Not because Schaeffer's bot is taking on world champs - that's a few years off - but because bits of the underlying UA code have escaped into the wild. Schaeffer licensed his team's software to the makers of applications like Poker Academy, which trains players in the game's finer points. But hackers have extracted the underlying code and are putting it to use in their poker bots.
Poker site operators say there's nothing to worry about, and for them there isn't. For now, sites continue to earn healthy profits because they make money by taking a percentage - the "rake" - of every pot. "If anyone's losing money because of the bots, it's the players," says Poker Academy CEO Kurt Lange. "It's inevitably going to become a serious problem when they figure out that bots win hundreds of thousands of dollars per year." Indeed, PartyPoker reportedly has 100 employees scanning for the presence of bots.
PartyPoker's Bhargava insists that the game is still fair. "There are people who spend all their waking hours dreaming about how to bring us down," he says. "They can dream about creating fantasy bots that will play for them or make them money while they sleep, but that's not going to happen."
"All right, we're on!" says Bornert, as the two laptops in the hotel room fire up WinHoldEm and join a game of Texas hold 'em on none other than PartyPoker. "Awesome!"
As the bot folds onscreen, Bornert leans back in his chair and soaks it in. Though he's watched this scene countless times, he's still impressed with his own technology. He imagines a day when sites acknowledge the presence of bots and when players embrace them as part of the action. But this won't happen, he says, until players take up the cause. "You've been woken up," he says, as the bot rakes in its chips. "Now what are you going to do?" Bornert hopes they reach the obvious conclusion: Use a bot, too.
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