Collecting chips

If you're going to collect casino chips stick to casinos fixing to go busted or close up shop.

Criminals and gambling

Lou doesn't think actual criminals could possibly be involved in running an internet gambling operation.

The TV culture

It didn't happen if it's not on TV but they all look alike on TV.

Catfish Bend Casino

A few months ago Catfish Bend Casino, run by a bunch of dead raccoons in Iowa, fired a security supervisor for putting a Dilbert cartoon on a bulletin board in the employee break room.

I'm happy to report that he has a new job.

If you've been to Catfish Bend in the last few months you should be ashamed of yourself. It's run by truly worthless slime.

Bill-O and poker

Bill O'Reilly discovers poker blogging.

Effective yesterday, all articles on the site (Brother Ed's blog) older than 30 days are unavailable. We’re going to develop a system to allow the content to be accessed for a fee, and when it’s ready the archive articles will be available again at some cost per article.

What an ultimate weenie.
He's happy with providing free content.

My original vision for this site was that it would be free to read. I always intended to make money from it, but I wanted that money to come from advertising, from donations, and from other sources, not from my readers. For a year and a half I’ve been delighted with how that free-to-read model has been working out.

But his evil masters have objected.

For about the last nine months, behind the scenes, I’ve been receiving pressure and threats aimed at forcing me either to shut down Noted Poker Authority or to make the vast majority of its content available for pay only (sounds ridiculous, I know). Up until now I’ve refused. But it’s become unpleasant and disruptive enough to me that I’m giving in. I’m not proud of it, but when I weighed my options this one made the most sense for me personally.

It's not really his fault, he's just a pawn in the hands of "those who control him".

I’m not happy with this solution, but to me it was basically either this or take the site down completely, so I’m going with this.

Pathetic.

Value of a gambling operation

Whenever you see some TV report of a bust of a large drug or gambling operation you often hear some big number quoted as "street value" of the drugs or the "revenue" of the gambling operation. It's almost always some really big, really bogus number.

Some bookie who does a million dollars of business over a weekend isn't likely to seeing anything close to a million dollars. Almost all the bets he books are done on the books. He won't even collect half million from the losers to pay to the winners. Many of the winners had previous losses on the books so they aren't going to get paid anything for this weekends win. Many of of the losers will be allowed to carry this weeks loss over to next week.

But prosecutors like numbers like a million, it makes them sound important.

Also, federal sentencing guidelines used to allow them to seek longer sentences if they could invent really big numbers to describe the handle. A recent court decision seems to have changed that.

The Supreme Court says that judges have to take into account actual profits when determining the size of a gambling operation, not just look at some theoretical total cash flow. If state courts (and newspapers) would adopt the same thinking it would help a lot in reducing silly raids on private poker games. The way things are now a prosecutor can make a poker tournament look a lot bigger than it actually is by doing something really silly like counting the denomination of chips on the table.

I doubt that this court decision will actually change how local prosecutors try to manipulate local news stories, but it's a start.