Celebrity Apprentice

Joan Rivers beat Annie Duke on Celebrity Apprentice. I didn't watch the final episode, although I did watch most of them during the season. I watched Breaking Bad last night and switched over in the final moments to see who Trump was going to pick as the winner.

2+2 has a long discussion on the show, most of which focuses on personalities and conspiracy theories. The best analysis of the show I've seen is Danny Boy's. He does a really good job of analyzing the show.

He's so much more coherent when he's not drunk.

(I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I just don't have it in me to be able to compliment Danny without an insulting followup.)

Although I do think Danny Boy did a good job in his overall analysis of the show, I do have to disagree with him about one thing. He says

I wasn't all that thrilled with how the profession of poker was portrayed on the show and I'd like a crack at giving people a different perspective. Too much emphasis was put on words like "deceit" and "manipulation" and while those are tools used at a poker table, I don't believe that if you play poker for a living those tools are something that are necessary in order to succeed in life, or in a game like Celebrity Apprentice.

I think that as a general rule poker players are a bunch of weasels. I don't like most of them and I don't trust most of them. That probably has something to do with why a lot of them don't like me.

Danny himself is a good example of the kind of weasels poker player's can be even away from the table.

A few years ago, before he got rich and famous, Danny-Boy was insulted by me and he challenged me to a duel, a heads-up poker match. Normally I ignore such school-yard pestering, but Danny offered 10-1 on a cash wager on the outcome of a 40 hour heads up limit hold'em match.

That was almost impossible to turn down. Even if Danny was a better player than me (something that's entireely possible) there's no way he would be a 10-1 favorite.

The initial problem was that I had no money. I also think that Danny-boy was busted at the time (this was before he was rich and famous) but he wasn't going to admit it. I tried to get Danny to give me a number, a maximum bet he would be willing and able to cover. He wouldn't do it.

By offering investors 6-1 on their money I thought I could raise $100k. So I suggested that to Danny -- my $100k versus his million dollars. He agreed. But the way he behaved I still wasn't convinced he wasn't busted. I don't think he really had the money and I don't think his tournament backers would have been willing to lay 10-1.

But I went to work on it anyway. Trying to raise cash. I found a video film maker willing to produce a documentary on the event. I found a backer to finance a series of vidios on heads up poker. I got a radio DJ to do a live internet braodcast of the event. I even talked to a Swedish TV producer about doing a reality TV show on the event. This was all before poker on TV was widespread. One of Danny's stipulations was that we play in either Las Vegas or Los Angeles. The match would have been legal in Texas and we could have done it rake free (I had a volunteer with many years of WSOP dealing and floor experience to deal it). But Danny wouldn't go for that. So I found a casino in Las Vegas that would sponser the event.

Then Danny balked. His new stipulation was that I just come out to Vegas and find him at the Belogio and we'd sit down and play right then. No advance planning, no fund-raising, and if I showed up on a day he wasn't in town that's just my tough luck.

That stipulation was presented after he had a friend call me (I think it was a potential backer of Danny) and talk to me about backing me. He wanted to know why I thought I had a chance to beat Danny. I was fairly open about that and would have told have told Danny if he'd have just asked. I thought I could play close to a game theory strategy and that Danny would likely beat himself with FPS trying to dance around.

Anyway, when it came time for Danny to call the casino that would be hosting the event to make arrangements for him to deposit his buyin (I didn't want to go to far in the planning until I actually saw the money -- I had some commitments from backers but didn't collect the monies because I never did think Danny would actually follow through). When it came time to show the money Danny Boy went berserk and the match clearly wasn't going to happen.

Basically I think Danny Boy is a worthless pestering weasel and that his lack of character is very typical of professional poker players.

Online poker room cultures

The Poker Chronicles has a nice post about historical changes in market supremacy among online poker rooms.

I find it odd and somewhat disheartening that Paradise Poker is switching to Boss Media's network. It sort of marks the end of an era in online poker, just like Kmart going bankrupt did for retail. I remember playing on Dise back when it had first opened and the only real competitor was Planet Poker. Their software was so much better, even for those of us who didn't know that Planet Poker's shuffle had been taken advantage of, that it was practically in a different league. It was what made me believe that some day online poker might be almost as good as the real thing.

I don't have quite the same emotional attachment to the downfall of Paradise, but it interesting to look at the ups and downs of individual poker rooms. One of the things that's changed in the poker world is the concept of celebrity. What made a poker celebrity 10 years ago isn't what makes a poker celebrity today. Poker rooms that understand that have done well, those that didn't understand if fell by the wayside.

Online poker started with Planet Poker. The main thing they provided was being first. The software was clunky, their software maintenance was not user-friendly (they had complete shutdown every Tuesday morning for maintenance.) They really didn't have much going for them. But they were first and they thrived. When online poker people said PP you knew they meant Planet Poker.

Then came Paradise Poker. What they offered was clean looking and clean operating software. Planet Poker responding to the better product by hiring two celebrity spokespersons -- Mike Caro and Roy Cooke. Both derived their celebrity from writing for Card Player Magazine. In those days Card Player Magazine was the poker magazine market, and the magazine strongly featured it's writers.

Today that market is a little different. Card Player isn't only part of the market and almost all poker magazines these days feature players seen on TV, not the writer's. Poker writer's aren't the celebrities they were in the past. That movement away from featuring writer's and featuring players started with June Field when she established Poker Digest and put players on the cover as opposed to Card Player who always put casinos on the cover. Card Player tried to stem the competition by buying Poker Digest, but the market was destined to grow way to fast for them to maintain a stranglehold on it.

Planet Poker's attempt to compensate for an inferior product by using celebrity flopped. They just kept losing market share.

But Paradise Poker also failed to respond adequately to competition. For a while the term PP no longer meant Planet Poker, it meant Paradise Poker. But that didn't last long. Party Poker came along showing a high degree of competence in promotion. They established strong affiliates, they had high player bonuses (funded by high rakes). Then when poker hit TV they hit it with ads. They succeeded in a huge way. It was all about promotion.

An underfunded room, Poker Spot, came along and tried to establish a niche by copying Party Poker's high player bonuses and combining it with tournaments. They were the first room to offer tournaments. But, it's harder to get away with very large rakes in tournaments and they quickly found that the high player bonuses didn't self fund without high rakes. They flopped in a big way.

But Poker Stars did succeed with their tournament offerings. Chris Moneymaker helped establish them as a new brand of poker celebrity -- a TV celebrity.

TV makes a huge difference in the value of celebrity. Something Planet Poker didn't last long enough to figure out.

Self Deception

There's a thread on rgp that started out with questioning something some poker player claimed in an interview.

In a recent Cardplayer magazine interview, Paul Wasicka claimed that
when he started playing, he was making between $1000-3000 a day
playing $10-20 Hold 'Em.

I don't think he's making that up, but I do think he's being somewhat self-deluded when he makes a claim like that.

Someone accused him of lying and I responded with this.

It's not really lying so much as it is a form of self-deception.

You see the same thing with waitresses, strippers, used car salesmen, and other
residents of trailer parks. When you ask them how much they make on an average
day they'll tend to answer with an approximation of an average good day, not an
average day. It's just the way they think.

Fuzzy brained people just don't have many rational thoughts. They don't really
make stuff up as much as it is they just don't understand the question.

I think that was probably his typical win range on a good day. That's not an average though, and like most people I think he just doesn't think about the difference all that clearly. There's really no reason why he should.

Then somebody took that as an opportunity to try to insult me in a way that I think is pretty funny. He said.

Gary is right. For example, look at the way he deceives himself about
his non-existent academic credentials and his non-existent poker
ability, even when the rest of the world can see what a useless, self-
important idiot he is.

What's funny about it is that it's completely contrary to pretty much anything I've ever claimed about myself. It's an example of how little people do pay attention to things and how little they tend to understand what they see or hear.

I have a couple of master's degrees. That means I've been an academic failure. I've attempted 3 different PhD programs, at 3 different schools, in 3 different fields. That's given me a pretty broad and pretty solid education, but it's not what I'd call academic credentials. I've often called myself a failed academic and I think my academic record supports that assessment pretty solidly.

As far as poker ability, I've never in my life claimed anything other than I can't play for shit.

So, while it might well be true that I'm a useless idiot, I think it's a stretch to call a clear and admitted failure delusionally self-important.

Anyway, I just thought it was funny.

What happened earlier this month?

I keep track of blog mentions of various poker players from time to time. I don't have nearly as an extensive list as I should have, I'd add to it more often if I wasn't so lazy.

But I noticed that a lot of names had a spike in the frequency of mention earlier this month. I guess something happened but I didn't notice what it was. Maybe it was something on TV. I guess I should pay more attention.