That time of year again.. humbug..
December 15, 2007
Lazy Winter Sundays’ …
It’s what winter Sunday’s are for isn’t it? Lazing around, open newspapers on the lounge coffee table, this morning’s breakfast dishes still piled up in the kitchen. Slopping about in sweats not really dressed, hair un-brushed and still magnificently vertical.
Warm cooking smells coming from the kitchen, some old black & white movie running unwatched on the TV. A pile of clothes washing sitting in the basket by the washing machine, waiting for someone (me) to make the supreme sacrifice of donating 5 minutes of their Sunday afternoon, spent in pushing said clothes into the machine closing the door and hitting the run switch.. hmm.. nope still can’t gather the energy for that one yet.
My arse is somehow magically glued to my computer chair and unless there is a sudden potentially fatal ‘cup-of-tea’ shortage it is going to remain glued until at least.. oh I dunno.. at the earliest dinner time I reckon.
.. Winter Sunday’s rock. 
….
Not much in the way of pokering this week; half a dozen SNG’s nothing of much note, placed in the money more times than not so not a bad week, though not a great week either. I was kicking my heels one night waiting for some pals to turn up. So I started opening up the poker sites I rarely play to see how much odd money I had sitting around, found $50 odd bucks in a Full Tilt account so went off and looked for a game and could only find a ten buck SNG Om HL PL.
I know we all think we have seen and experienced donks at the tables, but this particular table was a world beater. I sat slack jawed and watched donks calling all-in after the flop with not even a pair in their hand or the chance of drawing a hand! It was like donk lemmings, all seemed intent on committing poker hari-kari as soon as possible. Maybe that is what it was? A group of friends playing a side bet on who could get out first or something?
Well I ducked and dodged my way to heads up with the King Donk and true to form he donked me on the river in 2 or 3 hands in succession leaving me to wander off happy that I managed to get my stake back. Pinkdog arrived half way through and watched the end of the game, he can testify to this one, if nothing else it was entertaining.
And that is about it for poker games.
Thursday and it’s cold wet and windy..
Cold wet windy winter week days do not rock
Saturday morning 7am. I just did my shopping run to Tesco’s and it is packed out at 7am. People are flipping mental! They shop like there is a nuclear winter coming, the store is packed out 24 hours a day now and just because it is Xmas and god forbid the stores will be closed for 2 days! The commercialism of this time of year never fails to astound me. Put some pictures of holly on the salted peanuts and hey presto we have Christmas nuts and only twice the price of normal peanuts. Tuck a bit of tinsel around this piece of ham and we have a lurvely Christmas pork joint only 50% more than usual this time! It drives me to distraction … bah humbug..
I hit Full Tilt again earlier this morning and another $10 9 man SNG Omaha HL PL. And guess what? At least 6 of the 9 were once again total donks, playing any four cards and though not as bad as last time, it was pretty entertaining once again. This time me and a guy who had quite a good game ended up heads up and evenly stacked. Unfortunately time was against me I had to get going and ended up committing hari kari after 15 minutes of the money going from side to side at the table.
So any Omaha HL PL fans out there, if you fancy some relatively easy pickings I suggest you get your backsides over to Full Tilt pronto..
The rest of the blog is for this one last time a piece about my ex poker league. So if you are NOT interested in the league and what I have to say about it you’d best move along right now.. see yah next time and good luck on the felt.
Long Rant Warning.
Well I suppose I should write some stuff about my ex-league as I haven’t had the opportunity to state my side of things on the league forum, as I was instantly removed, banned and tossed into the cyber void for having the temerity to question why one of my threads had disappeared. As I mentioned in the comments in SvcMgr (Dave’s) blog it was quite satirically ironic the way it happened.
I posted a question asking where the thread I had been posting to had disappeared and I was replied to by the Admin, the answer I was given “because I [the admin] said so”. No discussion, no debate, you vill do az I say, you vill obey. Hmmm?… So I asked why and got the same response..
I had even tried to prevent any misunderstandings in my post by starting my original post with a “don’t take this wrong I am not trying to be negative but I have a question..etc” so I was a bit surprised the post and entire thread was removed and only wanted to know what rule I or any of the posters to that thread had broken. I can only surmise the post was removed in a fit of pique by you know who when he realised he had made another error in one of his confusing posted replies to the (now removed) thread. Leaving himself with nowhere to go except admit an error (fat chance) so he did his usual of removing the entire thread and pretending it had not happened.
So I post a reply apologising and that I didn’t realise the forum had become a dictatorship, sorry, my bad. And then incredibly I got a reply saying ‘that is enough of that you are banned!’ Man I couldn’t stop laughing, how ironic was that? Hey bud you run this place like a dictatorship not a democracy and the reply basically says, ‘No I don’t and off with his head’. Hahaha..
Obviously there had been yet another (unannounced) change, this one involving the forum changing into a dictatorship. For the last 18 months, the league forum and website has been subject to whimsical change and flights of fancy adjustments, without notice, every 3 months or so.
Every time the owner got drunk and had had a bad day at the horses or one of the games had a low turnout, he would make some insanely childish post. Where in a fit of pique, a tantrum no less, he would declare he was going to close the whole thing down and yadda yadda whine, whine..
Now the first couple of times this happened I was very concerned, because I had made some good online friends in the league and to think of having our little community broke up in an instant was worrying.
By the 3rd time I came to realise this was just him having a little drunk tantrum again and that as usual he would wait an hour or two then go and delete his childish ranted post and then pretend that nothing ever happened. Which could be quite confusing because there would be replies to his rant and people would come into the forum to continue only to find it all removed and none of the admin would engage in any questioning of what the f*ck just happened there?
(Also by this time I had got to chatting with a few of the more established members and they had all warned me about this 3 monthly occurrence)
So by about the 4th or 5th time this happened I was totally fed up, this immature drunken idiot was toying with my ability to socialise with my friends. I refused to leave the power to disrupt or affect my online enjoyment in the hands of a man that acts like a 7 year old boy, a boy who picks up the ball and goes home ruining the game for everyone, simply because he is a spoiled brat having a tantrum.
I contacted the people of the forum and wised them up to the virtues of Skype and today we have a small but select community that keep in touch through Skype. Anyone is welcome to join us any night for a chat or to share a game with us. My Skype handle is paulie45.
There is so much more I could write negatively about the league, or rather, write negatively about the way it is being run, but I got better things to do with my online time. This is a last time I mention those nincompoops again in the main blog. I will leave a final summing up here are a few (not all) snippets of information to ponder over..
Recall that video I made showing my game like an open book? I made that to help people and to help myself with any criticism from my peers, it was a pretty selfless act and it did leave me prone to the thing being abused by any unscrupulous folks out there. You may recall I got mad on my comments page at the time and that was because a certain person had just done exactly what I described above, they refused to share back what they had picked up and left me with this verbal comment one night “ Oh no I am not telling you what I learned from that video, you’ll find out when we meet on the felt”.
Oh well I expected a couple of the idiots to say crap like that, but I was wrong only ONE idiot, only ONE person out of the 100 plus separate IP addresses who watched that video, only ONE person from our league and forum acted selfishly and dishonourably in regards to that video. Only ONE person took the goodwill sentiment of sharing our poker knowledge with each other and turned it on its head and tried to use it for himself and himself alone. That was a low thing to do. Way to go Rich you certainly showed your true colours that day.
That single example there just about sums up the hypocritical and false facade that is painted by the owner every time he mentions, ‘it is about sharing, learning, not about money’. Total Bull Shit and he knows it!
For all the talk about sharing and helping each other, I can count on one hand the people that I saw go out of their way to help others with their poker game. I saw Pinkdog help several players with their game, I see the people that blog (links on the right of this page) and posit questions causing us to think about our game, I see the posts in the forum and they are few and far between that attempt to help or offer to help the members. In all of this how many are attributable to an admin?
Every time I tried to do something to help the community as a whole, Rich managed to corrupt it or totally f*ck it up. Ok the f*ck ups I can understand, we ain’t all perfect, though his egg shell fragile ego would bar any chance of rectifying the f*ck up because he would refuse to acknowledge any errors. Like his posted tantrums he wipes them from memory and they never happened.
He was hurting for money and his PC was older than the ark, it was effecting his interaction with the league, often he would crash out or couldn’t talk or post because of his ancient PC would be failing. Many nights he the owner was unable to interact with his community. So being a computer broker I said I would send him a PC and Monitor, after all it was for the good of the whole, for the community, it was going to help the community in the long run, etc
So the first thing he does is buy a DVD burner and then he is still not around interacting with the community .. not because the new PC failed no, but because he was downloading pirated films and music to then burn and make 45 cents a day selling to people down his local betting shop and pub. Nice move, not..
I spent a couple of weeks redesigning the forum, I made all the graphics from scratch and then spent a lot of time planning the layout and stuff for the forum. I built a back up forum where I was trying to get things right before going live. Then one day I log in to my backup board to find he had already decided to just take it all and go live with it on his site, still with about 25% more to finish. How impatient, how rude and how maddening. Yeah way to go.
And though this and many other things were for the good of the community or so I hoped and not for his personal gain, not once was there a thank you.
I didn’t care, I don’t care I didn’t do it for him. I didn’t do it for thanks, I did it because ultimately as a community we all benefited and that included me. I am not sure that actually happened a lot of the time and I’ll leave you the reader to work out why that was.
Later that night [the night I was banned] I then took a telephone call from him where for the first 60 seconds he screamed incoherently down the telephone at me. Where amongst the garbled banshee wailings I deciphered threats. It was quite comical to be honest and the telephone call was listened too and witnessed in disbelief by the group of people I was currently in Skype audio chat with.
Where over the course of the next five minutes he managed to blame everyone else he could think of for the reason of him banning me. Each new excuse was accompanied by guffaws down my headset from the folk in Skype. In no particular order;
1. ‘That all the members of the league complained so much to him all the time about me that he had to do something’. Umm ok, bit of a blow to think I was so unpopular to cause so many to write into Rich and ask for me to be banned, sheesh?
2. ‘That all the Admin had a meeting the night before and had voted to have me banned’.. umm but why did he just make a post basically saying “right that is it you are banned for saying that”
3. ‘It definitely isn’t Popa or Steph, it is everyone that wants you out, your attitude is wrong’.. This in response to my “I know Popa and Steph are all over my every move like a rash, ever since they got caught colluding by another member in a league game and then they came to me to back them up and I wouldn’t, because I had seen it too. And then a few months later I caught them at it again and again in a league game, it was basically admitted to by Popa in one of his PM responses to me, ever since then those two have been gunning for me.”
4. ‘I had no choice I was forced..mumble mumble’.. Yawn…
5. ‘Ok it might have been them two (Popa & Steph) but..mumble mumble..’ And so it went on until finally we both calmed down enough to have had enough of the conversation ( I was a wee bit het up too, what with the threats, I apologise Rich for promising to Rip your Head Off if you persisted in screaming threats at me down the telephone. Just don’t telephone me again in that manner and I promise I won’t do it.)
Still he calmed down from a raving lunatic to a less raving lunatic by the time we parted ways, with the agreement of a fixed price for the computer equipment he had had. Well at least I don’t have the bother of driving over there to pick it up now.
Dave and Netty have both made blog posts on their own blogs addressing their concerns over the issues at the league forum. They both have made good posts explaining their reasoning and thoughts on the matter, both I agree with and understand where they are coming from.
I am now signed up with a couple of new (democratic) poker forums and being pleasantly surprised by the lack of drama and childish histrionics on display. I’ll answer the comments if any but I ain’t wasting anymore of my online or offline time engaged in writing, thinking or reading about that particular dodo*.
Apologies for the rant folks, but I feel cleansed now, so promise yah from now on the blog is back to its usual serious content. haha
I am planning a Jamboree of poker on Saturday as Sunday is out because of the two big football games being shown live on TV here. A jamboree? Where did that word come from? Anyways hopefully I’ll be able to blog on Monday telling you all about my most profitable Saturday ever and then go on to describe how my beloved Arsenal ripped the Chelski into so many roubles to the pound. (fingers crossed tho)
Good luck on the felt as always.. I don’t expect many comments on this one for some reason.. lol
• *Dodo extinct flightless bird. Much like that site, never quite managed to get off the ground and is just waiting around for the last rites to be performed.
Comments
2 Responses to “That time of year again.. humbug..”
Got something to say?
I am not going to comment on all of what you have said Paul because I really do not see the point of continuing with argument back and forth as it really is not worth the effort.
Suffice to say if you are sure that everything you have said is the truth and we are sharing truths for all to read then surely you should have mentioned to your readers that it was you who logged into my old forum and deleted it and left with a post muhahaa. If we are all looking for the truth then don’t you think people should know what can happen when you entrust people with your sign in details.
I have read all the other Blogs, Dave & Netty and I did not mention anything on those blogs because they do not need to be dragged into any arguments we have going on. I am happy to hear you have found somewhere else to play and the best of luck to you. Something you should know Paul I myself have not been drunk for a very long time, in fact I have not had a drink in a very long time. So lets not go blaming drink for my actions I have never felt the need to do that so why would you.
Yes I agreed with you on the phone about the cost of the computer and that I can accept. As you have said and if it is true that our chat on the phone was broadcast on Skype then they would have heard me say that many members asked for you to be removed sometime ago and I came to you and told you I have declined in doing that. But even I have to bow to pressure when players refuse to play if actions are not taken.
Now I don’t expect others reading this to believe it and I will not try to convince them otherwise, we all make up our own minds. But I stick by what I said to you on the phone, we have had complaints and as a forum you have to go with the majority and not the minority.
Suffice to say I myself have nothing more to say on the matter and as far as I am concerned it’s all done and dusted. I can not speak for others as by your post it was not just me you felt you needed to have a dig at.
You will see from my post I have not felt the need to run you or your personal life down in any way.
So I wish you and your readers the best at the tables.
Believe me or not I never bothered to read your reply Rich, until today 6th Jan.
And.. yanno.. basically you really are a prize twat.
Goodbye.