[elysium]

hi everyone
i have been testing internet poker for the first time the past few days, and whew.....i've never played so many hands in so short a time before. they deal out hands fast. this site in question is paradise poker, where poker has gone to heaven.

i initially liked the games. this may not sound sincere but it is; the thing that i initially liked about the paradise games is that i was only subjected to collusion. that's fine. in fact, if you understand what the colluders are trying to achieve, collusion games are very profitable. also, collusion is very tough to do and often the colluders run into calling stations on a hot streak, or get trapped themselves between a victim and a quirk. but colluders actually show a sizable negative gain when facing a skilled player.

a skilled player can become so highly skilled that he actually makes subtle but correct compensation in his play in these collusion games. a skilled player can get the colluders to come at him when he wants, and stay out of reach at unfavorable times. the problem for the colluders is that they telegraph their intentions. the skilled player picks up on the telegraph, and manipulates the colluders and the rest of the field into a mathematical setting with a drawing hand, or a power setting with a surprising powerhouse. so, the skillful player becomes the force to recon with at the table. the fields turns to him for leadership. when the colluders are very strong, the skill player telegraphs the field to stay out. remember, the colluder and skill player are both vying for the field money. so the skilled player presents his case to the field that if they are going to lose, it is better to lose to the skilled player rather than the obvious gang of very menacing colluders. he also makes his wins a team effort. sometimes the colluders wither down to field people. a skilled player is very adapt at getting the table to support his wins.

he gets the colluders to run around and around until there butter like that. these skilled players can be awful skillful.

anyway, they are subtley suggesting to me at paradise that they don't really want me there playing after all. my thing was either leave right away and hope they send me my account balance, and i know that's a sensitive word so i'm saying it very softly (account balance), or do i stick around and find out what measures over and above collusion they were hinting at?

of course, i stuck around.

so what does it mean when you win the hand but the dealer pushes the pot over to the losing hand?

one of the protections against cheating is that hold em is so complex that it has certain aspects that are very unpredictable, and other aspects that are absolutely certain. for example, if you have a small set and your opponent has top two pair, he will always call you down and no pair will not reraise you. that's one aspect that is absolutely certain, but there are many others.

also, collusion does not mean a team of opponents who know what your hole cards are and the order of cards coming out of the deck, and then acting on that knowledge.

so whatever is going on is something that i know nothing about because i've never heard of such flagrant activity. it's not cheating either. there was a time when i didn't like cheating but most card mechanics going on is child's play for a skilled player. card mechanics only effect a small percentage of hands and are easily detected. this isn't an endorsement of cheating at the poker table, i just don't think that this is what is going on at paradise. i really don't know what it is officially called.

i'm in conference with members of paradise now advising them to develop at least a modicum of savoirfaire and to come home within the the parameters of something definable but its no use. yes, yes, they've signed up a king kong banking ceo and a few choice others. shoot, they took on me and tried to spit me out but i wanted find out how for the record books. i hung in there a little. as a matter of fact, i just received confirmation of a purchase that i didn't make with a debit card used only by one other merchant, yep you guessed it, paradise.

i ain't no ceo and all that, but i did a little swatting back today. at least one paradise ear is stinging. hate purchases you didn't make let you know you made at least some contact. but again, this is not the healthy give and play we all go through between colluders and low percentile card mechanics. colluders, card mechanics and i still ping. and i have yet to meet the first colluder or card mechanic that posed a lethal threat to the game we all know and love as poker. so what do you call it? what does this mean?