Over the Cliff

Once upon a time, I heard a great story involving lemmings. Like all great stories, I cannot remember exactly who told it to me; whether it was a documentary on television, some snippet on the Internet, or just the usual suspects down at the local public house. I'm not even certain how true it is. It could be anything from absolute cast-iron truth to no more than a germ of the truth. Perhaps it is purely apocryphal.

Those of us over a certain age are sure to remember the old-style nature documentaries as popularised by Disney. Nothing like the gritty docudramas of today, they had glossy production values, anthropomorphic storytelling, and cheesy voice-overs in the booming, baritone, American tradition. Wasn't it amazing how all of these creatures had cute names and shared the hopes and aspirations of the man on the street? One of these episodes was to feature the ill-fated lemming, who whilst being filmed was being far from cooperative. Lemmings, check; cliff, check; suicidal tendencies, nowhere to be seen. Exasperated by the happy-go-lucky nature of the stars of the show, and starting to feel the weight of the Hollywood maxim that time is money, the producers took matters into their own hands and forced the lemmings over the cliff.

Makes Mickey Mouse's smile a little more disconcerting, doesn't it?

A classic example of lemmings being herded can be found in the sometimes in(s)ane business practices of poker sites. During the height of the boom, one of the major players had steadfastly refused to add high-stakes games to its roster. Although these games are glamorous to the railbird, they rarely make fiscal sense to the operator. An ideal world to a poker site is a battle between remorseless equals, with rake as the only victor. This never happens, but the next-best thing is stakes that, although high enough to generate demand, keep bad players in action longer, through a prolonged, if pleasurable, poker death. As more and more sites fell to the allure of adding high-stakes games, I felt a grudging admiration for this one standout. Maybe someone there had a clue after all.

Wrong!

Suddenly, bizarrely, and completely unannounced, some management type had a brain wave and flicked the high-stakes switch. At the time, I was playing pot-limit Omaha, and there were probably no more than two or three $10-$20 games on the entire Internet. Overnight, there were 10 or so on one site.

Great news? Not really, for as these games pinged into existence, all of the very healthy games beneath them completely disappeared, until you reached stakes a tenth of the size. So, not only had this mastermind stroke reduced the total sum of rake on a day-to-day basis, but all of the mid-stakes players were now taking shots at a game their bankrolls could ill-afford. The long-term sustainability of the games was shot. Poker players were being rushed to the abyss, and the poker site in question was making less money in the short term and much less in the long term. Genius.

Sometimes poker players do not need to be herded. Sometimes they can be as myopic and suicidal as their lemming cousins, all on their own volition.

A recent example happened to me in 2007 when I was muddling my way through the $30-$60 limit stud eight-or-better games on PokerStars. For a while, this was a great game: recreational types playing for the buzz, a lack of the very best limit pros, three or four games almost 24/7, and huge, huge action.

Then, the problems started. The lemmings were itching for cliff action. "E-mail support to put up a bigger-stakes game," became the persistent cry from a whole range of pros. "Err …" was my unenthusiastic reply, mindful of the wonderful experience we had in the PLO world when we were last shepherded to the precipice edge. To be fair to me, I did try to elaborate on the "Err …," but I guess my lemming was a little rusty.

Well, the higher-stakes guys persisted, until eventually Stars granted their wish - a $100-$200 game. The sharp-witted reader will notice that this is more than three times bigger than the previous largest-stakes game, so natural progression up in stakes was very difficult. To compound this, the world of online stud eight-or-better is very small, and there was no other regular game anywhere online to act as an intermediate stepping stone. Ask yourself, in this post-Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act world, how easy is it for a passing fish to stump up the money to play in such a game? "Err …" again. So, where will the new blood come from?

That's right, the uber-limit pros, with big bankrolls and actual knowledge of how to play the game. Excellent. Overnight, the $30-$60 game was decimated, with the really bad gamblers taking shots in the bigger game, whilst the still clueless but not so rich fish got their kicks elsewhere, as the action deteriorated into a vicious cycle of tightness. Whilst in the big game, our voluntary lemmings had the pleasure of bumping heads against some of the best limit players in the world.

The world of poker players tends to be one of short horizons. Perhaps the hardest skill to learn is to think for yourself and make hard decisions. Remember, some players are born lemmings; others have lemmingness thrust upon them.

David has played poker all over the UK for the better part of a decade. Originally a tournament player, now focused on cash play and almost entirely on the Internet for the last three years, he makes a healthy second income playing a wide range of games. David is also an Omaha instructor for CardRunners.com, a leading source of online poker instructional videos.