Gambling sites banning US players

Quote:

Originally Posted by biondino

I read the Tim Smith article and thought I'd try and express a rather different view:

The habit started innocently enough, agreeing to join his friend Chris’s table at popular online gambling site Poker Room. Mark deposited $50 into the site via a credit card, which he always paid off in full every month, and sat down to play with half a dozen friends. He lost, but only $4, and quickly realised that he’d found something he could really come to enjoy.

Over the next few days, Mark pestered his friends to play more games with him at Poker Room. The wins and losses both came, one day costing him $37 – his girlfriend wasn’t too impressed with this new hobby, especially as she herself was in a lot of debt through 8 years of student loans.

Mark describes his situation, which couldn't be more normal. “I wasn't loaded but also wasn’t on the breadline, and could afford to spend a few bucks to get started in poker. Chris called it a ‘learning tax’, the thinking being that once I got good enough, through practice and education, I would stop being a net loser and start consistently making money. Made sense to me!”

Chris also introduced Mark to the Sit ‘n’ Go, a kind of Texas hold’em tournament – games where everyone pays a set buy-in fee and then plays until one person has won all the chips. He advised that these games were a good place to start, as the outlay was only $5.50 a go, which could provide up to an hour’s playing time for a small, fixed price. The top three places paid – first prize being a healthy $25 – and after a while, Mark started finishing “in the money” enough to take his account from a few bucks down back into the black.

Mark continued playing these $5.50 SNGs for a couple of months, until a more seductive challenge piqued his interest. The pluses of the SNG format – the opportunity to practice with low risk – seemed less thrilling than the charms of “ring” poker, where large sums could be won – or lost – on the turn of a single card. In fact, Mark was returning to the format he’d first experienced in online poker – and a $14 win within 5 minutes of sitting down convinced him he was in the right place!!

Meanwhile, Mark’s poker buddy Matt had come across William Hill’s poker site – it seemed as easy as Poker Room, but it offered pound tables as well as dollars. Thanks to the exchange rate, Mark and Matt were able to almost double their earnings overnight!

Unfortunately, after quickly winning £130, Mark’s inexperience told, and he lost all but £7 of his newfound riches. Annoyed and disillusioned, but still keen to play, he redoubled his effort to learn the game. He re-read the simple tutorials provided by Poker Room and William Hill, and also sought out a different source of advice – a dedicated poker forum on the internet called Flop Turn River.

On FTR, Mark encountered players across the whole poker spectrum, from micro stakes to big bucks, from ring games to 2,000-man million-dollar tournaments. The members contributed their personal expertise, discussing hand they’d played, debating theories and tactics and discussing which sites had the most to offer. As well as benefitting from lots of advice – not all of it good! – Mark realised that he could earn a lot more taking advantage of various bonuses (free cash provided by the sites as an incentive to play at them) and rakeback (a system by which the poker sites return some of the money they “rake” off each hand, which provides their income). So he set up a new account at Interpoker, complete with $100 a month bonuses and 30% rakeback, and started playing again, but with much more knowledge and confidence.

By the end of the year Mark was astonished to realise he’d made over a thousand pounds playing online poker! Along the way he’d bought himself a piece of software that tracks every hand he plays (along with those of his opponents) and it had proved a hugely useful tool for analysing his play – he’d been able to identify and work on leaks in his game when studying the statistics it provided.

Vitally, Poker Tracker also proved to him that after more than 50,000 hands he was a winning player. Poker is a long term game and because of the effects probability has on individual hands – even a 90% favourite loses 10% of the time – jumping to conclusions based on short term results is at best misguided and at worst dangerous. FTR had made Mark aware that only after compiling a large enough sample could he be sure that he wasn’t just getting “lucky”.

As 2006 arrived, Mark continued to play online poker most nights. There had been a certain amount of friction between Mark and his girlfriend, but Mark was able to solve the problem by spending some of his poker winnings on a laptop so that he could play while sitting next to her on the sofa. “I also managed to console her with a new computer for her thesis – as well as a ticket to the States to visit her mum – all paid for out of my winnings!” he laughs.

It’s now October 2006, and Mark is still reading FTR, still striving to improve his game, and still playing whenever he can - it’s a game with many fun varieties so there’s no reason to get bored. He’s even started playing real life games – live poker these days is far from being a seedy underground activity, as it was once perceived. More than anything, Mark’s thrilled to have a hobby that taxes his brain AND fills his wallet.

“Thanks to the internet, and the growth of reliable, accountable online businesses which provide everything I need, I’ve discovered a fantastic pastime that I’d never thought of trying before”, he says, logging onto Sun Poker, his latest site, and loading up four tables of 6max no-limit hold’em. “I always tell my friends they should give it a try – I’m worried I’m becoming a bit of a bore! But when I mention how much I’ve won just through playing low-stakes games with responsible bankroll management,” (that is, never playing stakes that risk more than a tiny fraction of the money you’re willing to spend on poker) “ I know they start wondering if poker’s right for them too!”