Be Gentle to the Novices

by Lee H. Jones | Published: May 03, 2005

"How many days has it been since I was born?"

This isn't a column about hold'em strategy. If you want to learn hold'em strategy today, read Barry Tanenbaum's column. Heck, if you want to learn hold'em strategy anytime, go read Barry Tanenbaum's column.

This column, in fact, comes from a thread (ah, a series of threads) on the rec.gambling.poker newsgroup ("RGP"). RGP is (like most Usenet newsgroups) filled with a lot of blather and trash: off-topic political rants, questions about the sexual preferences of poker celebrities, and other wastes of perfectly good electrons. But there are a few die-hard poker veterans who stick around there, asking and answering reasonable questions.

The thread (a series of posts on a single subject) that caught my attention was about dealing with "chat-cheaters." Here is the problem: Consider an online supersatellite tournament that is giving away 15 seats to a larger tournament. As the tournament gets down to two tables (18 players), the excitement builds as the remaining players realize that all but three of them are going to get seats. And an interesting phenomenon takes place – a phenomenon that's contrary to everything that poker is about: The players at a single table often start rooting for each other! "Wait – poker is a one-man or one-woman game; you against everybody else." I agree – it should be. But supersatellites make for strange bedfellows. After all, the person who comes in 15th in this event gets exactly the same prize as the person who comes in first. So, if you're planning to come in third, you can spend a little emotional energy rooting for the players fighting for the last few seats.

Of course, it's one thing to "root" for players at your table; it's altogether different to do anything about it, and unfortunately that line gets crossed on occasion. Sometimes, the players at one table will suggest (via chat) that they all constantly fold all the way around the table to the big blind. This will keep everybody at the table alive while they wait for real poker at the other table to bust out the necessary three players.

This behavior, or even the discussion thereof, is cheating – plain and simple.

Thus, the discussion on RGP took place. The veterans in that newsgroup are understandably appalled by this sort of thing. "Off with their heads!" goes the cry. Well, more correctly, the cry is for disqualification of the perpetrators – or, at the very least, removing their chat for a while, teaching them a thing or two. Since I'm the poker room manager for PokerStars.com, I review these complaints when the problem occurs at our site (although it happens at all sites, of course).

At PokerStars, we are relatively lenient with people who do this if it's their first offense, and I believe this is exactly the right response. Here's why:

Poker has been experiencing record growth. Not only is it record growth, it's really unimaginable growth – numbers that nobody could have possibly forecast. Consider this: The larger poker sites (PokerStars included) have doubled their business yearly over the last few years. Of all the players on our site today, half were not playing there (or likely anywhere online) a year ago. The players who have been playing for two years make up less than a quarter of the online poker population today. So, a large majority of the players on PokerStars and every other poker site are novices.

Well, what could serious poker players want more than a constant influx of new players? These people are new to the game, are just learning, and make lots of rookie mistakes. Most of those rookie mistakes will give money to the veterans. They overvalue their weak hands. They don't push their strong hands for full value. They call when they should fold. They call when they should raise. And you know what? They really don't mind. Most of them are playing for entertainment, and they're playing for stakes that they can afford to lose (which is wise). But, they're playing poker, just like they see on TV!

Indeed, this seemingly endless wave of novices is very profitable for the (good) veteran players. But there is another side of it. That is, many of them don't know proper poker etiquette and protocol. How could they? Nobody teaches this sort of thing, it's (mostly) not in the books, and even if it were in the books, few of the novices read the books, anyway. And I don't think you really want them reading the books before they start playing, do you?

So, everything they know about poker etiquette, they learned at the kitchen table, the neighborhood bar, or a frat house common room. In short, they know almost nothing about proper poker etiquette and protocol. And that brings us back to the original point of this column. It is this very ignorance of the rules that often starts chat-cheating discussions as I've described above. They are novices, and they don't know any better.

Now, we could throw the book at them. We could disqualify them and take away the hard-won seat in the target tournament. Or, we could take away their chat – silence them online for a while as penance.

I can't think of a quicker way to scare them away from the game, can you?

They're already nervous and a bit frightened. They know they're rookies and they know that some of their opponents are grizzled veterans of the table. If sites come down hard on them for infractions that they didn't even know were infractions, what are they going to do? They're going to leave. And they're going to tell their friends and family what a miserable experience it was. Life has enough stress without being sanctioned by a poker site, where you went to have fun.

So, we educate them – and are the first people to do so. We explain that what they're doing is against the rules, and why. We tell them that we're going easy on them – once – and that in the future, there will be stiffer penalties (and there are).

We are, for now, living in the "eternal September" of poker (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September for more about this term). The novices will eventually become veterans, and our wonderful pastime will grow and thrive. Until then, let's cut them all a little slack, make them welcome, and keep the long-term view in sight.

He's a stranger in a strange land."