Tag: blog

Good Spot for a Blog

It’s been about ten weeks since I’ve written – but I have valid excuses! 

The first month of absence was due to being laptopless. The most boring kind of topless. Life with a Chromebook was already challenging, but when the screen went on the blink, it had to go back. John Lewis put up a fight, but ultimately refunded me. That was April gone.

I rushed out to buy a proper Windows laptop, and that led to my second month of inactivity – I bought Balatro. Every time I opened my new machine to start a blog, I was waylaid by a “quick game” of this clever little poker startover (see previous comments). Goodbye May.

It’s as good as everyone said, and has probably sucked 50 hours of my life away up to this point, but it’s not super-dooper original. It’s one-player-power-up-draw-poker with collectibles. We had all those puzzle pieces twenty years ago. 

Fair play though, it took an enthusiastic amateur to throw it together, and now that guy is rich. I’m happy that there was a financial reward for poker innovation, and that it went to a complete unknown with no connections to gambling.

I digress. The third, and possibly best, reason for my silence, is that I’m on another European roadtrip. It’s very hard to find motivation to write when you’re stag-doing in Munich, sunning yourself in Majorca and pedaling about the Alps. Hello June!

Nonetheless, after three weeks of utter bliss, I find myself with a bit of spare time, an extraordinary view (see pic) and a laundry list of filthy gambling undergarments to air out.

Plus it’ll be nice to stop LinkedIn’s weekly reminder that nobody has seen my posts. How are you supposed to engage my unique talents if you’ve forgotten that I exist?

So to business. Let’s start with the ridiculous. 

On April 7, a lottery ticket in Oregon won a jackpot of $1.33B. That’s a bonkers amount of money for a single winner. What makes it more nut-boggling still, is that it’s only the eighth biggest win in the USA (FYI the record is $2.04bn). 

What a massive waste of potential enjoyment. That winner would have been almost exactly as happy with a $330M win, and then a whole other THOUSAND PLAYERS could have enjoyed a million each.

I’m sure the main winner was top-tier-chuffed with that amount, but the $1M runner-ups won’t have been so far behind emotionally. Let’s say they were next-tier-peed-a-bit-delirious. That means it could have created between 500 and 999 times more direct happiness.   

I know the big jackpot amounts are a successful marketing ploy, and I’m guilty of being lured in myself, but let’s find a better way to spread the glee. 

On the subject of joy-sprinkling, since I last wrote, Blackpool South’s crooked MP Scott Benton was forced out, and the Tories lost the subsequent by-election. They’ll have to fight it again soon and it’s highly likely to be a repeat defeat. 

Gambling isn’t really an issue for anyone in the upcoming General Election, so there isn’t much political commentary that I can offer. It’s not even a very interesting betting market with Labour looking like dead certs. You won’t get close to a 10% return betting on them to win.

However, in a small victory, the majority of politicians that have taken hospitality bribes from the gambling industry are Conservatives, so there is a good chance for more delicious blue bloodshed. 

Nowadays, I don’t usually have a strong opinion against left or right, but I’m strongly pro-competence, and that makes it an easy choice this time around. Starmer seems capable, and the incumbents are demonstrably not. I’ll be voting tactically to get rid of them.

While I’m following up on stuff, just a quick told-you-so on my Premier League tip. It didn’t take a genius to say Man City were going to win it, but it took some gambling savvy to highlight they were extremely good value at the ~1.8 pre-season odds.

If you took my advice and lumped your average first house deposit (£34K+) or wedding fund (£20K+) on that outcome, you’re now at least ten grand richer. Do remember to send me a postcard from your upgraded honeymoon destination.

To be clear, as you won’t have clicked the link to see what I actually said, I did not recommend playing for those kinds of stakes. Punting massive life sums goes against my responsible gambling thing somewhat. For the record, my average bet size is less than a fiver.

In sadder, and criminally overlooked news, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman passed away at the end of March. My use of the definite article there was no mistake, to me Kahneman really was THE psychologist. His body of work is essential reading for anyone in gambling.

That said, if I had been aware of his output while I was still in gambling (CRM/promotions in particular), then I’d just have done more damage. That’s saying something considering my hands are bloodier than a Lady Macbeth cameo in a Saw movie.

In short, Kahneman invented the field of behavioural economics (alongside the much-longer deceased Amos Tversky) and received the Nobel prize for economics for his contribution. How people behave when money is involved is critical to understanding gambling. 

I won’t suggest you go and read their academic articles, because despite their brilliance, they’re still in the abysmal dry format of scientific journals. But at the very least read Thinking, Fast and Slow, which distils the best bits into a readable book.

If that recommendation isn’t juicy enough for you, bear in mind that he ended up marrying Tversky’s widow. So he was kind of a freak. 

Finally, it wouldn’t be a spring blog smorgasbord recap if I didn’t have a rant about the Grand National. Not the race itself, that was excellent and mercifully free of horse-slaughter. No, once again, it’s the DAMN BOOKIES that deserve my ire (that’s the block caps hat trick, I’ll stop shouting now).

My girlfriend is a once a year gambler, and wanted to place a bet, so I thought we’d have a look at the sign-up offers for the big race. I was surprised to see there was pretty much no special effort being made to attract new customers.

Just about all the big names are offering contrived “bet £10, get £40 in free bets” offers that “reward” you with promotional wagers on their highest margin and most addictive products (bet builders and slots respectively). Manipulative cross-selling right out of the gate.

That sucks, but it isn’t the worst bit. I wasn’t getting any decent promotions either! Almost no gambling companies were making an effort for the Grand National. In a hyper-competitive market place, that is almost inexplicable. 

It’s like florists going dark in the week of Valentines day, or supermarkets neglecting to stock chocolate eggs for three months prior to Easter. Something is suspiciously afoot. 

Did all the big sportsbooks decide to have a profit-boosting truce? We know they’re in constant communication for both good reasons (coordinated blocking of disordered gamblers) and bad (the machinations of lobbying body the BGC).

Perhaps they decided not to waste £10M each in promotional costs by scrapping over a saturated market, and just pocket the cash instead. How depressingly plausible.

It’s a very smart play if true (which my gut says it is), but horribly uncompetitive. As gambling consumers, the only leverage we have in this rigged game, is to take our business elsewhere. If everyone has stopped trying, then we’re all losers.

My Wagnum Opus

In the last blog, I finished with the promise that I’d talk about my most important contribution to the Isle of Man, and upon reflection, probably to the gambling industry in general. 

That’s a big claim considering I coined the term Freebuy (a portmanteau to describe tournaments that are a cross between a Freeroll and a Re-buy), which is still in light occasional use to this very day, and co-invented the wildly popular Coiny Coiny Shoe Shoe. 

But it wouldn’t be a proper ReluctantGambler blog if I got straight to the point, so allow me to moonwalk us back across the dancefloor of nostalgia with a little context.

There was a period in the late noughties where PokerStars staff were issued with random number generators (RNG) to make remote logins more secure. Nowadays these tokens are mostly managed with smartphone apps, but back then it was a little key ring with a six digit calculator screen.

Within minutes of their distribution, these devices were misappropriated for gambling games. Partly because the early core of PokerStars were degenerates, but also we were paid too much and taxed too little.

All the games were coin-flips at heart, but the complexity varied. In the simplest format the person whose RNG produced the highest number would win the prize. The most complicated was a tedious poker variant, where the numbers were treated like cards, and the best “hand” won. 

My preference was for a higher variance version where you added up your six numbers, then compared totals with your opponent. The lower number was the loser, and had to pay the difference in the scores to the winner. I tended to play best of three to prolong the torture. I’m not sure if I was attracted to the higher levels of jeopardy, or if I just liked doing maths. 

By the way, all the winnings were denominated in Fun Points. Talk of cash was forbidden, so we gambled in euphemisms. Luckily, one Fun Point was equal to one pound sterling, so reconciliation was easy and no-one had to pass around ratty Manx fivers. Fun fact, the Isle of Man government hasn’t replenished their stock of five pound notes since the reign of King Orry in 1079.

The RNG games were fun for a while, but there is something unsatisfying about a game where you just stare at a digital read-out for a minute waiting for the six digit number to change. It is not a joyful play experience.

So one night, whilst we were dabbling with a deck of Nintendo-themed playing cards, I suggested a game that I knew (from crappy dealer’s choice home games) as Mexican Heatwave. I’ve also played it as No Peak in the USA. 

It is a poker variation where everyone gets seven cards face down. The left of the dealer starts by turning over their first card. Each subsequent player then has to turn over their cards at random over until they have the best hand showing. The moment they have the best visible hand, they stop turning, and the next player begins. This continues until all of the cards are revealed and you can see who has the best hand.

Played “properly” there is a round of betting every time there is a new leader in the hand. In this authentic form, it is a truly terrible version of the game. Worse even than Razz, which is the poker equivalent of being waterboarded with hot Carlsberg.

But, if you just pay an entry fee of 10 Fun Points, then let the game play out, it’s really good fun. Now you have a game with twists, turns and tension, and still blissfully skill-free. 

The true innovation came, though, when I noticed there were a couple of unused Warios (a Nintendo joker) lying off to the side. I proposed we shuffle them in, and that if you turn over a Wario, then it kills off all the cards you had turned over until that point. Effectively forcing you to start again with a partial hand.

This had a twofold fun-boosting effect. Firstly, it allowed for the glee of Schadenfreude. That meant roughly 1 in 7 hands would be cruelly and hilariously ruined. Secondly, it prolonged the uncertainty. A runaway early leader remained at risk until their final card was safely exposed. As long as there were Warios left in the deck, calamity could still strike.

This was a big improvement to the game, but there was one final tweak to come. There was a rare case in which one player might get dealt both Warios. One was harsh and funny, but two seemed like overkill, so we decided to make it a good thing. 

If you were dealt both in the same hand, not only did your dead cards become live again, but both the Warios became wild, i.e. they could be any card you wanted them to be. That made it an almost guaranteed win.

This version, aptly referred to as Wario, caught on. By the time I left PokerStars (years later), there was a regular Friday lunchtime game that could involve upwards of 20 players, each putting in 20 Fun Points. 

That meant shuffling three decks together to ensure there were enough cards. It was pure magnificent gambling carnage. I’m told the game continues to be played, and I know that ex-staff have taken it with them to other companies. Wario lives on (albeit with boring normal decks).

Officially speaking, I’ve always shared the credit of the invention with at least two others, because I wouldn’t have come up with it on my own. But I think it’s fair to say I did a lot of the heavy lifting. 

The credit seems a minor, petty thing, but only a few months ago I received a 4am text asking me to resolve a dispute over the rightful origin story. 

That meant a lot to me, because it speaks to how good the game is, and confirms that people still care all these years later. That’s my kind of legacy.