Bad Bets, pt. 1

Pushed in half my chips with JJ after the board was all undercards. I figured I had seen pocket aces only two hands prior and I could probably push someone out with the unlikely QQ or KK because they might think I hit trips and their pot odds were sort of crushed by my big, smart, play. Unfortunately he pushed all-in. I looked at him. He crouched in his chair and scrunched up his nose, strength was coming off him in waves BUT this is why I shouldn't play poker: I called. ACES!!! Not again! 

nothing doing....

Online poker should be made illegal. Or at the very least, as a friend put it, "we probably need some laws there." And how! It's a veritable license to steal. If someone set up a lab in Thailand with fifty employees all hunched over keyboards and crunching the numbers, they would probably make as much money as a small hedge fund. All it takes is patience, a knowledge of your opponent that can be catalogued and someone dumb enough to actually put money in play. It's not like playing scrabble online where you sort of come face to face with the other gamer A. because it's one-on-one B. you're both weird enough to be playing scrabble online that you probably will strike up a conversation. Online poker is serious business to the players and attracts the worst kind of grinders and stay-at-home dads with nothing better to do than sit at a $.25/$.50 table for six hours until their KK, AA, comes along and someone actually calls them. It's the worst. There needs to be some kind of skype-avatar-verification system in place because I'm convinced that some Russians are probably rigging up there systems to some Deep Blue type computer. I realize there is some controversy about the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act and keeping overseas gambling industries from doing online business in the U.S., but it's hardly the point. Not even U.S. companies should be running these lotteries for at least another technological generation in terms of cyber security. Ugh.