David Pogue recently wrote a column where he channeled Ric Romero, and marveled at how people online can be such outrageous dicks, and behave in ways that would get them a cockpunch in real life.I just got bounced from today's Team PokerStars freeroll tourney, and I have to say that even I am shocked at how unconscionably rude these people were; I don't know how guys like Chris and Greg deal with this shit every single time they sit down to play. The quality of their insults was second only to their ability to mangle basic rules of English grammar and spelling.
I tried to leave my observer chat on, because part of my responsibility as a member of Team PokerStars is to chat with folks and stuff . . . but oh my god, I was just stunned at how outrageously idiotic these unaccountable people were. I ignored the comments as best as I could, and just played my game, but I'm going to have to turn observer chat off (or get PokerStars to put a chat moderator on my table) for the rest of the tourneys. That's a real shame, but without accountability and someone to whack them on the nose from time to time, the loudest and most annoying person seems to win in this online version of Lord of the Flies.
I played as well as I could, considering the blinds move up every 5 minutes and it's tough to do much of anything without cards to back it up, but I kept my stack right around 1500 until my M dropped to around 4ish, and I found pocket sevens. An active player with a big stack limped in EP, and I thought about jamming to get heads up, but I got distracted by the haters and just raised, pot-committing myself without using whatever folding equity I had. As far as I'm concerned, that's my only mistake in the hand, so when a player reraised behind, the EP limper called, and I saw a chance to triple up to just over average, I figured I was about 45% or so to win. I called, and they both showed over cards. One guy paired his king, and IGHN about 1/2 way through the field. It was really cool that he was so excited to win the tourney ticket, though, so that was pretty cool, since the whole point of these events is to thank the players who have made PokerStars such a success in the online poker world.
I have to say, though, when I was eliminated, I was a little relieved that I wouldn't have to put up with the insults and various misspellings of "you're" and "your" anymore, and I will admit with some shame that, though I thought it would be fun to play some low-limit cash poker before the Wheetie started, I decided to virtually walk away, so I could get a break from these children. There's something really wrong with that, from both sides, I think.
1. After witnessing your table tonight, I agree it's mind-blowing how rude some of the people can be in general. Tonight was especially sick and wrong though, considering they are competing for free money offered as a gesture by an online poker site, and they treat a representative from said poker site in that way.
I don't know how you do it, Wil.
Posted at 8:53PM on Dec 26th 2006 by Joanne Lutynec