Re: About chat...
You are totallly correct MB. Chat can be full of play style indicators. One of the most typical is the moralist.
The moralist sees poker as a strange little exercise in ethics: you master your desire to gamble by only playing reasonable hands in reasonable situations, you don't raise unless you have a strong hand, you don't stick around for outrageous longshots, everyone waits their turn for good starting cards and/or good flops and then wins their allotted amount and everyone's happy.
The people who complain about other players breaking these rules (I can't believe you called with that! I can't believe you raised with that!) tend to be very predictable in their own play. When I see someone like this I don't need to see many hands to know what to expect from them.
The game's psychological component is already whittled down to an extremely narrow channel in online Poker. From an EV perspective, I can't imagine anyone voluntarily shutting off additional information.
But for me, chat is also a small reminder that this a game.
I know my attitude about this is different from a lot of you guys, but at the end of the day this is an important part of the experience for me. Yeah, I know most chat is just whining, or insults, or banal chit chat. But the point is that you are engaged in a stylized social interaction with other human beings. The emotional and psychological content of that interaction is an essential part of the package for me. And it's complex - it can involve intense aggression and struggle for domination and anger and animus and revenge. It can also involve admiration and respect and goodwill.
So, even though this social aspect of the game is almost completely absent from online play, chat serves as a small reminder of it.
Actually, now that I think of it, I belive staying in touch with this aspect of the game is long term +EV. We tend to de-humanize our opponents a lot around here. To patronize them and think of them as anonymous target dummies, or a great sea of unwashed, uncultured cannon fodder, unworthy of our respect.
But great poker thinking, at any level, requires the deepest empathy with your opponent.
And killer poker can only be achieved by someone doing battle with foes, not exterminating insects.
And thinking about your opponents as faceless, error-ridden algorithms to be exploited by the most efficient possible mechanical process is the first step to becoming a robot yourself.
I guess I'm a bit of moralist myself, and also quite the chatterer. Sorry!
/mc
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