Party Poker Blog

Poker Blog

There is much to post but sadly, I endured a late afternoon dentist appointment and I've been loopy ever since.

I'm not too out of it to notice that Party Poker is down again, however. It's difficult to believe this has become acceptable, but it has. God knows I won't leave Party, though.

What do you picture in your mind when Party Poker goes down for hours at a time? Network geeks scrambling for duct tape? Indian guys heading out to WalMart to buy an extension cord? Someone driving home to grab their old Pentium 2 box to set up as an extra load balancing server?

I LOVE PARTY POKER!!!

Here is my favorite (non-smartass) response to the post from yesterday about collusion and weekends.

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If you are playing 3/6, i'm not sure i'd worry about collusion at all.
Any colluders who are good at it have bigger fish to fry. Assuming
collusion exists at 3/6, for them to still be at 3/6 they must be grossly
incompetent at it, or else they'd be at 30/60 not 3/6. I'm sure it
happens but not very much at low limit. I still contend that you get more
bad beats on the weekend because of more bad players, not more cheats. If
you are a good player, that means you are starting out with much better
hands than your opponents in general. So what happens is that you are
often in the position where your opponent needs to outdraw you to win.
Therefore, proportionally you will experience more bad beats than a bad
player who often gets beats because of pure stupidity.

So the basic deal is this, if you are winning at 3/6, don't worry about
collusion unless you see something repeated and blatant. I've seen single
instances of things I thought might be collusion, but as I played with
that player more, I realized that the player is just a moron and raises
with anything. I've also been in situations where I was in a 3-handed pot
with the goods, and you have a moron raising you, which although you gotta
love it, I kinda got worried that people might think I was colluding
though I definitely was not. There are players out there who will try a
pure bluff, all the way to the river in limit poker with absolutely
nothing, and it's not a conspiracy.

Anyway, I'm not denying collusion exists, but I suggest that it doesn't
happen much at the low limits, if you want to understand "implied
collusion", do a google search on the topic. You can also look up
"schooling". There is also a good article on Badger's site
playwinningpoker.com on why schooling isn't as much of a problem in O8B
which does a good job of explaining how loose games are sometimes so
frustrating in Holdem and why this isn't as common in O8B

Ok, that's all. Good luck!

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