Continuity of Message

Throughout the past few years, businesses in our industry have started to realise that poker has become a truly global game. Even before Black Friday, the USA no longer represented the overwhelming majority of players as it once did, and companies couldn’t rely on the US market alone if they wanted to be successful.

Poker companies began to acknowledge the importance of carefully tailoring their product to each market, and as a result, we saw classic poker books from authors like David Sklansky, Dan Harrington and Doyle Brunson being translated into Spanish, German, and French. Online poker sites introduced foreign-language websites, support teams and game software. Magazines and discussion forums sprung up for every market, live poker tours started to flourish in places we never thought possible, and celebrities and pros from many new countries were signed up to represent the game.

Localisation of your product is hugely important, and it’s easy to see why – simply look at a company which doesn’t bother to localise it’s product to your country, and see how you feel. Look at the TV advertising from a company such as IBM or Chevrolet for example, who reuse the same advertising and branding concepts in Europe as they do in the USA. When was the last time you bought any product from IBM? Would you even consider buying a car from Chevrolet?

The simple fact is that people don’t tend to like products that are too ‘foreign’ unless they evoke a particular image of quality or luxury (such as French perfume or Italian fashion). Companies in many types of industry regularly forget this however, and the results are often disastrous. Take the infamous case of the Coca Cola Company, who attempted to launch their bottled water brand ‘Dasani’ in the UK a few years ago. Dasani is water taken from the mains, and then put through a very advanced purification process before being bottled and sold. Water purified in this way is huge business in the USA, and you can’t walk any Las Vegas poker room without seeing bottles of it on the tray of every cocktail waitress. But Coca Cola didn’t tailor their product to the European market in any way, and the press ran with the story that Dasani was simply ‘bottled tap water’, killing any hope that the product would be successful.

It seems that online poker companies have realised that, while poker is a fundamentally American game, you can tailor the product to individual markets like Britain, Russia or Australia and make it even more successful in those regions. But it’s important that the local message you send to those regions persists from the first moment that the customer interacts with your product until the last, and this is something that many operators are getting wrong.

One example that never ceases to irritate me is the ‘English only’ rule. This rule states that players must only chat at the tables in the English language. It stems from live poker games, where there are concerns that if two players are speaking in a language that nobody else understands, they could be colluding with each other by sharing their hole cards or cheating in some other way. The rule famously appears in the movie Rounders, where Ed Norton’s character chastises two Russians for speaking ‘Sputnik’ at the table – a term which nicely illustrates why I don’t like the rule.

Players who speak a so-called ‘foreign’ language at the tables are typically issued with a written warning for doing so, which might coincide with a temporary chat ban. Such players, who probably haven’t taken the time to read all of a site’s rules, are often completely perplexed by this course of action, and rightly so. Take a German player as an example. This player came to your German .de site after seeing a German advert on German TV. They downloaded the German software, reviewed their game using German hand histories, and may even have dealt with your German support team. But they’re not allowed to chat in German? Why not?

This type of action alienates players in markets where poker is growing the most (markets where English is not the first language) in order to satisfy paranoia in markets where online poker is dead or declining. The English-only rule doesn’t do anything to prevent serious collusion – when was the last time you caught a professional collusion ring who were sharing hole cards in the chat? It only helps to dispel the appearance of collusion – but what is more important, appearance or the facts?

Another example that I think deserves serious thought is the issue of game currency. Since the birth of online poker, we’ve been using the US Dollar for our cash games and tournaments. This made a lot of sense in 1998 when the only country that really mattered in online poker was the USA. It even made sense in 2006. But does it make sense in mid-2011, now that Black Friday has rewritten the rules for online poker operators, and no major site is accepting US players?

Once again, the theoretical German player has interacted with your company from Day 1 as if it were a local company, just as likely to be based in Berlin as in Gibraltar or Dublin. When that German player comes to deposit, chances are they can use their Euro credit card to do so, and they might even be able to keep their account balance in Euro too. But when they go to play in the games, all of a sudden they are required to change their money into US Dollars?

The German player has probably never been to the USA, has probably never held a dollar bill before, and has probably never looked at the conversion rates from US Dollars to Euro. Yet you’re forcing this player to make this leap – and for no good reason, since players from countries that actually use the US Dollar aren’t allowed to play anyway!

Of course, the currency issue isn’t that simple. Every good Poker Room Manager knows that the more games you spread, the more you run the risk of fragmenting the player base and actually decreasing game stability, along with the number of hands dealt and revenue generated. But isn’t it worth at least trying different approaches to this issue, instead of adopting the ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’ attitude?

The continuity of your message to players in regional markets is damaged when you tell them that they can’t do what is natural to them – like speaking their own language or playing in their own currency. Each time you put a player in such an unnatural position, there is a chance that they might leave to play elsewhere, or not to play at all. These rules and policies are in place simply because of the history of the marketplace, and because nobody has thought to rethink them.

It will be a shrewd poker operator that is the first to get these things right, and provide a continuous message to players regardless of which part of planet Earth those players are from, and what language they speak. Will it be your company?

This article was published in InsidePokerBusiness, Jul-Aug 2011.

Gold Farming

The online poker industry, and the poker-playing public, is at war with bots – that is, computer software that plays poker without human intervention. At first glance, this is a somewhat illogical position. After all, playing without human intervention is not necessarily cheating, because a poker bot plays by the same rules as everybody else. A typical bot doesn’t collude, abuse other players in the chat, or multi-account, but it does keep games running and generates revenue. What’s more, a typical bot is extremely predictable and should therefore be simple for a skilled player to beat. If you didn’t know much about poker, you might think that a bot would be exactly the kind of player that the public would like to play against and that poker businesses would want as a customer.

However, the vast majority of the poker playing public does not want to play against bots. This is partly due to an irrational fear of bots brought on by the success of computer programs at playing chess (IBM’s Deep Blue computer) and backgammon (Snowie), which has led players to believe that sophisticated poker bots are going to win their money by playing perfect, unexploitable poker. As a result every top poker site prohibits bots, not because they are against the rules of the game, but to protect their reputation.

But there is another, more philosophical reason not to allow bots. Some bots are designed by computer programmers as a sort of intellectual challenge – the same sort of motivation that drives programmers into hacking or virus creation. Others are used by people who either can’t resist the urge to cheat, or who are looking for the next ‘get rich quick’ scheme. But neither of these types of people is a poker lover, and no bot is a true participant in the game of poker. A bot does not contribute to the growth or popularisation of the game like a human player might. It doesn’t socialise with other players and create a fun environment like a human player might. A bot doesn’t engage in the game beyond simply taking action – it doesn’t enrich the lives of others or create joy. Every bot which breaks even or wins simply drains money and resources from the online poker community without giving anything back. That’s the real reason not to allow them.

In 2004, I was approached by a businessman who wanted to create an online poker ‘sweatshop’. He proposed that I would develop a simple strategy for beating the game, and he would then hire workers in India at very low cost to play the game using that strategy, with all of the profits going into the business. He didn’t see this as unethical because the players wouldn’t be colluding with each other, and no bots would be used which were against the Terms and Conditions of most sites. Indeed, what he was proposing was totally within the rules. I declined, and no doubt the businessman went on to find someone else to develop his strategy. This was my first encounter with a ‘gold farm’.

The term ‘gold farming’ derives from the popular online role playing game ‘World of Warcraft’, developed by Blizzard Entertainment. The game’s virtual currency, known as ‘gold’, is bought, sold, and traded for real money outside the game. As a result, a similar problem as in online poker arose, with bots designed to play automatically and earn gold which would then be exchanged for real money, and teams of workers in countries like China and India being paid to earn gold from the game. These gold farms could make money because of the extremely low cost of labour and the relatively high price that the in-game currency attracted in the real world.

In online poker, a gold farm consists of a group of workers paid to play online poker. Their accounts are funded by their leader, and the workers are paid a salary for the number of hours they put in, with profits going to the leader. Workers don’t need to be poker players, as they can simply follow a strategy from a chart, or from one of the many advisory programs available to assist players as they play. Workers might assemble in an office, or work from home.

In recent years, gold farming has attracted some mainstream attention. In 2008 and 2009, a notorious gold farm from China made a lot of money playing Seven Card Stud online. Although no cheating was ever proven, the fallout from the case resulted in a lot of negative publicity, a great deal of suspicion, and much resentment from players.

It’s abundantly clear then, that players don’t want to play against gold farms. What’s more, gold farms detract from the game in the exact same way as bots do, by draining money and resources from the community without contributing anything in return. For those reasons, I believe that gold farms should be prohibited.

I can understand the industry’s reluctance to do so, however. After all, it’s generally not a good idea to create a rule which you cannot effectively police or enforce, and detection of gold farms is potentially very difficult. Unlike bots, gold farms interact with the games in exactly the same way as a normal player, because there is a human at the controls. The difference between a human gold farmer and a human poker player is small and difficult to detect.

Automatically analysing the playing style of players and comparing them against known strategies, which is a technique used by online backgammon providers, could potentially identify those players who follow strategy charts, or use an identical strategy to other players - a potential indicator of a gold farm or a bot. However, this method’s reliability is questionable if used in isolation and expensive to implement.

Another alternative is to not spread games that can played well by following a simple strategy chart. Two obvious examples of such games are short-stacked No Limit Hold’em cash games, and tournaments with very fast betting structures such as Hyper-Turbo Sit & Gos. By not offering such games, you make it harder for gold farms to develop a simple winning strategy.

Also worth considering is prohibiting the use of third-party tools which provide advice about what action to take in every situation. It’s one thing for a tool to tell you what the pot odds are, but it shouldn’t be acceptable for a tool to tell a player that they should ‘raise all-in’. Yet such tools exist and are allowed by some sites.

Lastly, we can make gold-farming more difficult by placing stricter rules on player-to-player transfers, which are often used to fund the accounts in gold farms, and on the sharing of accounts by multiple players.

These are just ideas. It is worth investigating how Blizzard and other developers of online role-playing games deal with the same problem, and of course the best solution will be one that the whole industry adopts together. It’s clear to me that gold farms are just as much of a threat to online poker as bots are, and are just as unwanted by the poker community. It will be a brave but virtuous business who takes a stand against them first.

This article was published in InsidePokerBusiness, Mar-Apr 2011.

Poker Expertise

What is the most important asset that a poker business has? This is a question that many companies have had to think about as the industry of which we are part continues to streamline and consolidate. But I think that some businesses are missing the point and getting the answer to this fundamental question totally wrong.

You might say that the most important asset a poker business has is the customers. After all, customers are the source of the business’ revenue and keeping them happy is paramount. If a business loses all of its customers, then there is no business left.

In reality a poker business’ customer base is in constant flux as new players sign up and existing players lose their money or get bored and leave. While there are of course customers who play regular long sessions for years on end, such players are the exception rather than the norm and represent only a small portion of the overall player pool.

The fact is, while you should obviously try your best to keep your customers happy, if the business makes an unfortunate mistake which upsets a lot of players, those players aren’t necessarily gone forever. It's possible to win them back, or to gain new customers to replace them. Customers are a very important, but ultimately replaceable asset.

Good staff, however, are not so easy to replace, because good ‘poker guys’ are hard to find. Many of the people who are genuine poker experts don’t want to turn an enjoyable hobby into a full-time job, or perhaps they are making a good living from the game already and don’t like the idea of a ‘nine to five life’. Maybe they don’t want to move to one of the industry’s awkward locations, and would prefer to stay close to their family and friends. The poker lifestyle is an intoxicating one and it’s not easy to convince people to leave it.

But without poker expertise, a poker business cannot possibly reach its full potential. It’s difficult to make the right strategic decisions for the future of the business if you don’t have anyone on the board that understands the game, and can anticipate the kind of things that players will be looking for in the future. It’s impossible to make good poker room management decisions, such as what kind of ring games to spread, or what a tournament’s pay-out structure should be, or even what new promotions to offer, without a strong understanding of basic poker principles.

Consequently, it never fails to distress me when I hear that there are some companies in our industry that discourage their employees from playing poker. I’ve heard of casinos that don’t allow their dealers to play, and online poker providers that don’t allow any of their employees to gamble at all, perhaps because of concerns that this may result in problem gambling or other issues in their workforce.

This is utter madness. If you were a wine producer, you wouldn’t expect your employees to be teetotal, despite the obvious risks to productivity that come with alcohol. How on earth can you actively encourage your staff to be ignorant of your product? If you make decisions without poker expertise, then you will make decisions that are not properly thought out because you don’t have all the information that you need. How can you possibly know how your poker room compares to your competitors’ poker room if your staff are not allowed to actually play poker? The truth is you can’t, and this will show in a shoddy product with weak promotions and sub-standard support, and cause your customers to become upset and lose respect for the business. The end result for a company’s reputation and success will be disastrous. Businesses that discourage their employees from playing poker will never be at the top of the poker industry, it’s that simple.

In 2010, there have been some key instances where having poker expertise has helped businesses to innovate or respond to a problem quickly. Take the issue of short stacking, for example. Towards the end of 2009 it became clear that this practice, once barely known but now widespread, had changed the way No Limit Hold’em ring games were played online. The resulting dissatisfaction among both professional and recreational players was obvious and acute. The companies with the most poker expertise were able to respond quickly by changing the buy-in structures of the games they offered, and by choosing a new structure that addressed the issue effectively. Companies with less knowledge and expertise took longer to react, chose a new structure that didn’t satisfy players, or worse still, didn’t recognise that changes needed to be made.

There is a tendency for poker businesses to undervalue poker experts. It’s easy to see why, as many poker businesses were founded by a small group of enthusiasts who found themselves short on business knowledge as the company grew, and had to hire people with that knowledge in order to keep themselves afloat. However, good businesspeople are much easier to find than poker experts.

A good businessperson can come from any other company. If you’re looking to hire a new head of accounting for example, you simply advertise the position, knowing that the person you recruit doesn’t have to have worked in the poker industry in order to do a good job. You might actively choose somebody who had worked at one of the big accounting firms over somebody who had worked for a poker company. There are lots of people out there that have years of experience in business in general and can do a very good job as long as their role is completely isolated from the poker side of the business.

Poker experts however come from a very small segment of the population. They are geographically disparate and difficult to recruit. A poker expert is like a diamond – rare and difficult to obtain, but extremely valuable. While many poker experts have little to no experience working in a formal corporate environment, they do have a big upside in that you can take a poker expert and teach them to become a businessperson. The typical poker expert is smart enough to learn the skills they need to succeed, either through formal education or on-the-job learning, and might really thrive with a little encouragement and support. It’s much more difficult to do things the other way around and turn a businessperson into a poker expert – you just can’t expect to be able to instil the kind of passion for poker that is needed to become an expert into somebody with no experience of the game.

As a poker business, you should recognise the poker experts within your company, value them as much as they deserve, and provide them with opportunities to develop their career and to grow as businesspeople. After all, it’s easy to turn a bracelet winner into an MBA graduate, but not so easy the other way round. If you don’t provide these opportunities, then you risk losing your expertise, which is the lifeblood of any poker business. A business without that lifeblood has no hope of survival in these times of tough competition. Undervalue your experts at your peril!

This article was published in InsidePokerBusiness, Jan-Feb 2011

Security Alliance

All reputable online poker companies employ security staff, both to protect the company’s interests by preventing fraud, and to protect the players’ interests by preventing collusion, multi-accounting and bot use in the games. Good security can save you money, boost player satisfaction and trust, and safeguard your reputation.

However, there is a major problem with the current status quo. Say your security team has a major breakthrough, and catches a ring of colluders. It’s a huge case that has taken hundreds, maybe even thousands of man hours to reach a conclusion. As a company, you’ve spent a fortune on developing tools to catch collusion rings like this one and training expert staff to use them. So you confiscate the colluders’ money, and return it to the players. Perhaps you chip in some of your own money to meet any shortfall in the compensation.

That’s great. Unfortunately, the colluders don’t go to court to be sentenced. Instead, they simply learn from their mistakes, and move on to one of the many other sites, equipped with a more advanced strategy for avoiding detection. They continue to cause harm to players and to the industry – the only difference is that they are doing it somewhere else.

When you go to a shop to buy a DVD, you don’t buy two copies of the same movie. When you go to get your hair cut, you don’t get it done twice by two different hairdressers. When you pay an affiliate commission for sending you a new player, you don’t do it twice. It’s one of the most obvious rules in business – you don’t pay for the same thing more than once. And yet this is what happens in the online poker industry every single day, because you are paying to catch cheats and fraudsters that have already been caught and barred by other operators.

In the brick and mortar casino industry, information on cheats and other undesirables is shared amongst operators, either through lists of unwelcome players supplied by the local regulator, or through a commercial service such as that provided by Griffin Investigations (Las Vegas’ famous ‘black book’). It may be that a particular cheat or fraudster has never set foot in your casino before, but using this shared information, you can identify and catch them before they are able to cause any harm.

In policing, information on known criminals is shared between different police forces, through organisations such as Interpol. If a criminal commits fraud in the United Kingdom, they can’t simply run to Brazil or Mexico and start over with a clean slate. They’re arrested by the Brazilian or Mexican police as they enter the country and are made to face the music. Over the years, 188 countries have come to realise that they are better off working together in this way.

I strongly believe that, like the world’s police forces, we are stronger together, and that we should put aside our differences on security issues. If we share information about known cheats and fraudsters – such as user IDs, IP and MAC addresses, hardware identifiers, suspicious VPNs and colocation servers, geographical trends, as well as the actual cheating techniques used – then we, like casinos in Las Vegas, can catch undesirables before they cause any harm.

I am not suggesting that we should build another bureaucracy, but I do feel that an independent security alliance, comprising of expert members from each of the operators that wishes to participate, is the best way to accomplish this goal. The authority can disperse information on new detection techniques, best practice, and information about trends in fraud and other security issues between its members, and can run as a not-for-profit organisation. An independent authority can also provide an escalation point for high profile cases where players feel that they have been treated unfairly, and provide a greater scope for peer review of complex fraud, collusion or bot use scenarios.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing security as a competitive advantage. After all, if your security is stronger than your competitor’s, then they will tend to lose a greater proportion of their revenue to fraudsters and cheats, which has knock-on effects in how much money they can devote to competing in other areas such as new acquisitions and player retention. Also, a site with poor security doesn’t do its reputation any favours and may lose some more discerning customers as a result.

You might also think that because there are so many operators, each with very different numbers of players, that the bigger sites would contribute a disproportionately large amount of information to the security alliance compared to smaller operators. That may be true, however, the amount of quality, useful information is what really counts. Site A may have ten times as many players as Site B, but it would certainly not have ten times as many fraudsters because fraudsters are much more likely to play on multiple sites compared to a typical player. So the information contributed by Site A would not be ten times as useful to the security alliance. Further to this, whatever fraudsters were caught by Site B would be very likely to also target Site A, or have targeted it in the past, simply due to its size. So a healthy compromise is reached, with a single piece of Site A’s information of a lower quality than Site B’s, but Site A providing more information than Site B to redress the balance.

I think it’s important to recognise that we are all interconnected and that our actions have a ripple effect throughout the industry. Every poker operator depends on others for a certain amount of its success. When one operator breaks into a brand new market in a previously untapped area of the world, every other operator benefits (though perhaps not as much) from the new surge of interest in that region.  Conversely, when there is a huge scandal in the industry, every operator is damaged, regardless of their involvement. I think we can agree that all poker operators were harmed significantly when the ‘superuser’ scandals affecting the UltimateBet and Absolute Poker brands were publicised.

Improving our trustworthiness and each player’s feeling of security is of paramount importance to attracting new players and retaining existing ones. By launching a security alliance, we would send a strong message to cheats and fraudsters that their time was up, and companies that took part would enjoy a significant boost both in PR and in player trust.

This wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve worked together as an industry. We’ve worked together on Responsible Gaming issues, through organisations such as GamCare. We’ve worked together on the US legal situation, and on defining regulatory frameworks in emerging markets such as Italy, France and Estonia. So why not work together on security also? We are an industry that deals with colossal amounts of cash, so you never know when it might save you a million dollars or two. 


This article was published in InsidePokerBusiness, November-December 2010

First Book Released!

My first book, entitled 'What I Know About Poker: Lessons in Texas Hold'em, Omaha and Other Poker Games' is now available online at Smashwords.com, Amazon.com, and Amazon.co.uk! Here's the description of the book:

Poker is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme. Becoming a consistent winner takes effort and dedication. In this collection of classic articles and much new material, prolific poker strategy writer Alex Scott explains:

• How to use Expected Value, Pot Odds, Position, and the principle of Tight-Aggressive play to make good decisions
• How to transform your No Limit Hold’em game in five simple steps
• How to play Five Card Draw, Lowball Draw, Triple Draw, Badugi, Five Card Stud, Seven Card Stud, Razz, Stud Eight or Better, Chicago, Super Stud, Omaha, Omaha Eight or Better, 5 and 6-Card Omaha, Double Flop Hold’em and Omaha, Courchevel, and Chinese Poker – including basic strategy guides and dealing tips for each variant
• How to play when the river is dealt
• What to do when you play your first live tournament
• When to pass up close gambles in tournaments
• How to avoid common bet-sizing mistakes
• How to use Fold Equity
• How to make money playing Short-Stack Strategy (and how to defend against shortstacking)
• How to turn a small investment into big money playing Steps Sit & Gos
• When to bet into a dry side pot
• How to play when your opponents straddle
• How to utilise the ‘squeeze play’
• How to avoid results-oriented thinking
• How to keep good records
• How to use tells and your opponents’ mannerisms when playing live poker
• How the Tight-Aggressive and Loose-Aggressive styles evolved
• How to use M and the Independent Chip Model (ICM) to make better decisions in Sit & Go tournaments
• How to avoid common ‘robotic’ and predictable plays
• How to play when you are card dead
• How to defeat online opponents using HUDs
• How to use the metagame to your advantage
• Why Nietzsche was Right about Poker
• How Superstition hurts your game, and how you can best use intuition

The book includes 13 quizzes to test your knowledge of the material covered.

One of the most comprehensive poker guides available, ‘What I Know About Poker’ is a must-have for any player’s library.

The eBook is compatible with PC, Mac, Kindle, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Sony Reader, Nook, and all other eReader devices.

The book will shortly be available at other retailers, including the Sony eBook Store, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Diesel eBook Store, and more!

50 Articles!

I've reached a milestone in my career as a poker writer, with 50 articles now published online at my website, and 47 in print or published elsewhere. You can see the full list at:

http://www.alexscott.im/articles/

Here are some of my favourites:

Starting Hand Evaluation - One of my first ever articles about poker.
Why Nietzsche Was Right About Poker - Blending my interests in philosophy and poker.
Plain Sailing - One of my first strategy articles for InsidePoker, on river play.
Easy Money - A Short Stack Strategy - To this day, the article that has generated the most feedback from readers.
Tell Me More - An article on tells, summarising previous work in the field and adding some of my own ideas.
Advanced Sit & Go Play - Probably my most advanced strategy article.
Dealer's Choice - I love all varieties of poker, and this article looks at some of the more unusual ones.
Superstition and Intuition - The fiftieth article and one of the ones I'm most proud of.

Lastly, check out the interview with myself and my colleague Mike Jones, recently conducted by CardPlayer:

http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/7295-poker-stars-to-give-away-1-million-in-added-wcoop-seats

British Poker Open 2006 Videos

In 2006 I played in Heat 6 of the British Poker Open on British TV. I made a few ill-advised plays under pressure and ended up finishing second to Mike Matusow. There were a few entertaining moments, so here are some videos.

At the time I was playing internet poker for a living, and it shows on my fat face!

Sky Poker Appearance

I was interviewed on Sky Poker (Channel 865)'s show 'The Club' last week. Here's a video of my part of the episode:



Very busy at the moment - the World Championship Of Online Poker just started at PokerStars and we are guaranteeing over $30m in prizes.

Hope you're all well!