For the better part of 2013 –and for some people going back years—Lock Poker has been widely criticized on a number of issues, chief among them the extremely slow withdrawal speed the site has been plagued by. As wait times for checks have stretched from weeks to months the poker world has been asking questions, and questioning the financial solvency of one of the largest US-facing online poker sites.

For the most part these criticisms have been addressed by Lock Poker representative

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Online poker in the United States has been a sordid affair dating back to the passage of the UIGEA law in 2006. What started as a minor inconvenience –the loss of several online poker room and slower deposit and withdrawal times—gradually became worse and worse. In the aftermath of UIGEA poker players saw their options dry up, and the hoops they had to jump through places higher and higher. This process –which I will liken to Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” idea, where people’s lives are made so

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As always, I watched the WSOP Main Event final table to see the results, but also with a critical eye, looking for some of the stranger things going on at the event. Here is what I noticed at the 2012 final table.


Robert Salaburu’s “No Huddle Offense”

Do people in the crowd really need to be patched-up?

Jacob Balsiger’s energy release

The introductions, countdown, and cheesy smoke-show have to go

Save the Five-Betting

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In the first installment of this series I talked about the future of online poker; now I want to talk a little bit about the individual instead of the bigger picture by taking a look at the expectations of poker players in the new poker economy. Before I get into the discussion on expectations it’s probably a good idea to repost the opening salvo from Part 1 of this series:

There are two distinct groups of poker players when it comes to expectations and these groups will both have

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Ever since Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 World Series of Poker pretty much every Tom, Dick, and Harry (and even some Jane’s), have looked at poker as their chance to make some serious money, but since about 2006 the poker world has changed quite a bit, and the chance that any new player can be a successful poker pro has dropped to almost zero –not that they were all that high before.

I left the poker world as a player in 2006, and there are countless people in poker that are now either

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