“What!?! No way!! I can’t believe he caught that! This s*** is f***ing rigged!” This was a familiar sound from my room every fifteen to twenty minutes, during my three year stint of playing online poker. My roommates often would roll their eyes, because they knew I was about to come to the living room to tell them about the unjust way I’d just lost. It’s funny how every bad beat in poker is the same type of story. Let me guess, you flopped a great hand, then the other guy stayed in calling ridiculous bets to catch a miracle card on the river. In most cases with online poker I’d agree with the poker star (even though I don’t really like him) Phil Helmuth, “If it weren’t for luck I’d win every time.” Mike McD (Matt Damon) in Rounders made me a believer that there wasn’t luck in poker. He made me believe it was a sport, and a skill game. I guess it’s partially true, only because there are a lot of morons out there but too many of them win. Maybe poker is just plain luck, and Hollywood fooled me again!

The worst thing about poker is having to suck up a tough beat, because most of the time you’re fuming inside then you hear the winner say “that’s poker”. It has to be one of the worst lines ever uttered, because you know you just got screwed. What’s it supposed to mean? What is poker? I think it means “Well I guess poker is all luck, and I’m luckier than you.” Is it really all luck? It’s hard to believe, but yes folks for the average player it is. It doesn’t matter if your Bill Gates technology smart, there is rarely a confident feeling in a hand while playing online.

This brings me to my grief/joy that online poker is finally being shut down. By now most have heard that many of the big online gambling websites are being shut down in the U.S. The main reason was that all their money transactions were being processed through offshore accounts, and this upset the government that we were wasting our money in foreign places. I’m very split on this issue, in that I want to keep playing online, but wasting away a chunk of my paycheck on this crap is ridiculous. I could write a book on bad beats, (pretty much anyone who plays enough has 500 bad beat stories) but it’s so tempting playing a $10 tournament to possibly win $2,000.

The draw to continue playing though comes with those big winning days, which is close to one of the best feelings in my life. I mean winning a couple thousand dollars for playing poker online, what could be an easier way to make money. Oh yeah the fact that you’ll lose it back the longer you play. Just like casinos the house always wins.

This I feel is the inconsistent part of online poker. I’ve seen too many hands online that would win 95% of the time in a live game, but somehow they lose to a more improbable hand. I found this more in online cash games as the rake accumulates the bigger the pot is. So the site is essentially slowly draining money from the table as the pot increases, the dilemma is that improbably hands happen all the time so the pots get ridiculous. It may not be that much, but when they rake from consecutive split pots (two players with the same hand) you have to wonder. How many times can two people have the same great hand? My current roommate felt the wrath from online poker. He lost a $150 in one hand after he flopped quad kings, and proceeded to lose on the river to quad aces (he didn’t play for months after that devastating hand).

My third and possibly most coincidental argument has to do with the rare occasion of winning. I was jobless for over a month, and played a lot of online poker. During that month the only days I won significant amounts of money was on Thursday’s and Friday’s. Weird, I know. I mean c’mon, I played the same way every other day of the week, so why all of a sudden do I win on those two days!?!

Well I guess I have to say that I’m relieved that it’s over. So what’s next? I bet $100 that poker isn’t nearly as popular as it has become. How many times on television do you hear about a guy that got into a tournament by playing online? I’d say 80-90% of the time. So if there’s no internet poker play maybe the game will return to it’s former glory that Mike McD promised us. I definitely think the television ratings are going to drop, as I only watched poker while I was playing online. I think the government decided to stop the poker boom, or at least tame people from maxing out their credit cards on poker in foreign accounts! (Semi-guilty as my Visa had plenty of deposits every statement).