#234: “Black Mirror”

Donald Trump leads the polls for the Republican primary. The Pope acknowledges climate change. David Cameron enjoys bestial necrophilia. Charlie Brooker couldn’t write it. Well, he could and did, but fuck, when I watched his vision of the near future in ‘Black Mirror’, I didn’t realise the near future he was depicting was Autumn 2015.

The latest news in the world of online poker is the restriction of HUD use, a move by the two biggest poker sites that will piss off some and delight others. As a non-HUD user, my instinctive belief was ‘this is good news for me’ and to a wider extent, ‘this is good for online poker in general’ as it could act as a sort of profit regulator, limiting the amount of edge extractable from any single game for the long term benefit of the poker ecology; This could in some way level the playing field for the recreational player or HUD luddite (HUDdite, if you will).

However, my instinctive belief may be incorrect and I’ve heard opposing theories on how HUD-restrictions will actually hurt the HUDdites in the long run. The argument goes as follows: Players who previously relied on HUDs will cut their number of games so that they can focus more on note-taking and game flow. This will have two consequences. Let’s say the pros keeps Tourney A and B but drop Tourney C. The pros who are now paying more attention to tourneys A and B will extract a greater ROI from the weaker players in those games. Tourney C will shrink in size and the guarantee on that game will decrease. A reduced guarantee will discourage the recreational players who are motivated by the carrot of a big first prize so they will instead play A or B. Tourney C will eventually be removed from the schedule. Now in tourneys A and B, the pros will not only have a greater edge over the weaker players but more weaker players per tourney to exploit that edge. Feeling that they are being exploited at a greater rate than before, the weaker player will get discouraged and stop playing. As this happens, Tourneys A and B incrementally shrink in size as will the pro’s expectation.

In truth, I’m not sure if things would play out in this fashion and I’m not sure if the assumption holds up that pros paying more attention will be more effective than them interpreting HUD data. I think some of them would do better but I also think some of them would struggle, having perhaps become too reliant on their HUDs. Also, it’s fair to say that the above prediction is overstating the likely changes to the poker landscape. The restrictions being implemented are not substantial at the moment and players are still allowed to let their software do much of the grunt work when it comes to analysing their opponent’s ranges. That said, it is undeniable that poker has morphed into a very different animal from the game that the Texas road gambler’s brought to Vegas in 1967. Nash equilibrium and GTO have delivered unexploitable mathematical solutions to certain spots while Holdem Resources Calculator helps players to construct balanced ranges.

So, you have to ask yourself: What chance do the recreational players have? And if the answer is slim to none, then that is a problem. It has always been an essential quality of poker that the worst player can win or, at the very least, enjoy the experience of winning sporadically. So it’s easy to see why Pokerstars have invested so much towards the popularisation of Spin n Gos ($3 Billion paid out in that format in the first twelve months) and Zoom, effectively killing the liquidity for Sit n Gos and ring games. As formats, they effectively rake faster (Spin n Gos have raked $50 million this year and Zoom is 4x as quick as normal speed ring games) and, in the case of Spin n Gos, a not insubstantial portion of the equity is randomly redistributed. In other words, they give the recreational player a better shot.

Pokerstars (and other sites) have been compelled to make these changes to level the playing field as it’s not in their interest for a newcomer to get fleeced and never come back. Nor is it in the pro’s long term interest. But the pro is in a dog-eat-dog world. He cannot be expected to exercise restraint. If he doesn’t hoover up that equity when it’s available, then someone else will and then it’s gone.

The problem is that Pokerstars are directly benefiting from these formats at the expense of everybody. One way of looking at the online poker industry is the websites and the pros competing for the recreational players’ money. The thing is recreational players have a budget, not a bankroll, so the longer their deposits stay in action, the more it will be raked.

Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s the worst kept secret in the poker industry that there is a war on the professionals and a conscientious effort to kill the majority of them off. In the Amaya era, bottom line is all that matters and poker is just another gambling game, a game that the powers that be believe is better served by a social media marketing campaign to the followers of Christiano Ronaldo than it is by the aspirational story of a pro who built up a 6-figure roll from freerolls.

In fact, there has been a targeted marketing campaign for over a year now dedicated to pulling down ‘The Pro’, depicting him not as an aspirational figure but rather as a greedy, ruthless vacuum cleaner of your hard-earned money. Well that’s nonsense. Yes, the pros take money out of the system but conservative estimates show the site swallows up 80-85% of the money lost by recreational players.

Look, if the sites were really concerned about the plight of the recreational player, wouldn’t they marry the existing changes with lower rake and registration fees? That would certainly help deposits last longer. In fact, they are doing the opposite right now, while, at the same time sending out their vacuous mouthpiece Daniel Negreanu to spout drivel about rake increases being good for the eco-system. It’s cynical, it’s manipulative and like a lot of things that are championed by Negreanu, it contains a false narrative that preys on the fears of vulnerable and gullible people.

And with these lies, Pokerstars is selling a paranoid vision of the future that they must prevent in which five full time professionals, all with a myriad of software at their finger tips, are vying to win a dollar each off one guy playing on his phone in the pub. If that were true, then that would certainly represent a miserable disintegration of our game. The real black mirror though, and the future we should be warding against, is one in which the respectable skill game we love is transformed into an unbeatable gambling game unworthy of the definition ‘Mind Sport'; desecrated and dismantled, gutted and warped, stripped down and tarted up, bastardised and trivialised, zombie-farmed and candy-crushed, a mindless frivolous bingo, an ignoble spinning wheel of whimsy.