swampster Posted January 15, 2008 Share Posted January 15, 2008 Shameless plug time - this month's Flush out, with the last girlie cover for a while featuring WPT girls Layla Kayleigh and Kimberly Lansing. Also a feature on ROUNDERS, HIGH STAKES POKER uncovered, 7 Card Stud Beginners' Guide, plus, er, Christopher Biggins (you'll understand when you read the feature:)) cheers Jon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swampster Posted January 15, 2008 Author Share Posted January 15, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! also welcoming letters for the LEtters page - star letter gets $200 in their Betfair account - not too shabby at all. PM me if you have anything you want to send me. JY Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slapdash Posted January 15, 2008 Share Posted January 15, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! HIGH STAKES POKER uncovered' date='[/quote'] While I wouldn't hold an article in a poker magazine to the standards of a Bernstein or a Woodward, I'm not sure that "I don't believe they're really risking that much money, and anybody who does is an idiot" quite qualifies as an exposé in the best traditions of investigative journalism. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swampster Posted January 15, 2008 Author Share Posted January 15, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! true - I didnt agree with everything he said, but it was quite interesting all the same and I kept it in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slapdash Posted January 20, 2008 Share Posted January 20, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! OK, I'm going to have a bit of a rant. Make yourselves a cup of tea and sit down. In case anybody didn't realize, the article that swampster and I were talking about was by Richard Marcus, the self-confessed and unrepentant cheat, who (realizing that nobody's likely to offer him a job in any establishment that doesn't keep the paper clips under lock and key), has rebranded himself as an "expert" on cheating. Now I'm not getting at you personally, Jon. In fact, what really made me see red was an article by him in another magazine, on collusion in the WSOP. This article had a lot in common with his Flush article on players in HSP not really playing for the high stakes that they "pretend". In neither case did he give any evidence for his accusations. In neither case did he even claim that he had any evidence for his accusations. No, in both cases his entire case was that, with a lot of money at stake, it was inconceivable that there wasn't dodgy business going on. Pure speculation. Now, if Mr. Marcus has something to say about the mechanics of cheating at casino games, he may well have some insight that most of us don't. If he has something to say about detecting cheaters, then I concede that he is probably well-qualified to speak. But when it comes to what people in general will do when faced with a situation where they might gain by cheating, then he's one of the least qualified people to give an opinion. We can probably place Mr. Marcus fairly uncontroversially in the bottom percentile of the population, ranked by integrity. What on earth does he know about how likely people with a normal share of moral fibre are to cheat? If you'll forgive a rather tasteless comparison, it's like getting Harold Shipman's opinion on how doctors in general are likely to deal with vulnerable patients. Now, I'm not saying that I know there is no collusion in the WSOP (with the large number of players involved, I'm sure there must be some bad apples). I'm not saying that I know that the players on HSP don't reduce their risk behind the scenes (I have no idea). I'm just saying that both of these articles were almost entirely free of content: no information, just baseless accusations. Another thing about the WSOP article made me mad. He starts off by reminding us about Jamie Gold admitting that he soft-played against a friend in the 2006 main event (fair enough). But he also tells us about the "Bill Chen episode" in the 2007 WSOP. In case anybody here hasn't read about this, what happened was that in an early round of a "shootout" event (i.e., a series of STTs where the winner of each table goes through to the next round, so in each round it's as though you're playing a satellite to the next round) Chen was heads-up with a chip lead against his opponent. They didn't know whether the rules allowed them to make a deal at this point; they asked and were told that it was allowed (though it seems the rules weren't very clear and this may just have been the opinion of the floorman that they asked ... though reportedly deals were quite common in this event, not always with explicit permission). Anyway, they made a deal: Chen advanced to the next round, with his opponent to get 25% of any prize money he won. Now, you may well think that the rules shouldn't allow deals like this. For what it's worth, my opinion is that they shouldn't, though there are arguments both ways. But in any case, the players did nothing underhand: they asked whether it was allowed, and only did it when they were told that it was OK. But Richard Marcus gives none of the important details. He reports this as Bill Chen offering an opponent 25% of his winnings in return for "chip-dumping". And he says that "to make it even more blatant" they called a floorman who "actually gave his assent". Now, for Richard Marcus of all people to make snide and innacurate innuendoes about other people's integrity like this really makes me want to vomit! He's written many other articles about cheating in poker, and aside from what I think of his ethics, the articles just aren't very good, and he clearly doesn't really understand poker very well. For example, there was an extremely silly article about collusion in live games. So, two players can get an advantage by sharing information about their hole cards: true. They can transmit information by placing a chip in a certain way on their cards: true, among countless other ways. But then the major part of the article was a detailed description, complete with multiple diagrams, of one particular code that they might use. Unless you actually happen to come across the particular team of cheats (who are probably fictional anyway) who use this particular code, who fcuking cares whether they put the chip on the top left or the bottom right of their cards to show pocket aces? And when he gets to describing how the colluders might then use the information to win money from honest punters, half of it just doesn't make sense. I don't collude and don't intend to, but in a couple of minutes I could think of far more effective ways to do it than some of the ways he describes. He's just a malignant parasite on poker journalism, and the sooner the magazines tell him where to get off, the better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swampster Posted January 21, 2008 Author Share Posted January 21, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! you'll want to read his latest rant on 'drugs in poker' then ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slapdash Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! you'll want to read his latest rant on 'drugs in poker' then ;) I'll look forward to it. :ok In his book "Dirty Poker" he describes how he went to the 1994 World Superbowl of Poker, got suspicious about how one small group of well-known players won more events than would be reasonable and then actually detected them blatantly colluding (one of the things he seems to think is blatant is somebody calling at limit holdem with 12.5/1 pot odds when his only hope was the "long shot" of a queen to complete his straight, by the way). I decided to try to find the event winners from the 1994 Superbowl of Poker, to try to guess who these anonymous well-known players were. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything anywhere ... which maybe had something to do with the fact that 1991 was the last year that the Superbowl of Poker existed? Seriously, should you really be paying good money to this man? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveO Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! you'll want to read his latest rant on 'drugs in poker' then ;) I'm surprised this issue hasn't cropped on this forum or in magazines. When I've played in live tournaments a lot of the younger ones openly tell you if they've taken cocaine or amphetamines as they reckon it helps them to stay focused. I even know of lads who take cocaine to stay focused whilst playing on the net:loon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slapdash Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! I'm surprised this issue hasn't cropped on this forum or in magazines. When I've played in live tournaments a lot of the younger ones openly tell you if they've taken cocaine or amphetamines as they reckon it helps them to stay focused. I even know of lads who take cocaine to stay focused whilst playing on the net:loon. I wonder if they've seen pictures of Stu Ungar towards the end of his life? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveO Posted January 22, 2008 Share Posted January 22, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! Youngsters live for today slap, Stu Ungars demise won't deter them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swampster Posted January 22, 2008 Author Share Posted January 22, 2008 Re: New FLUSH magazine out now! interesting then that they arent banned - especially when most live tourneys these days go on to the wee hours. will they be banning Red Bull in casinos in the future I wonder? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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