Deux Ex Machina

“Do you know why you’re afraid when you’re alone? I do.” — Vincent Gray, The Sixth Sense.

Sometimes I see ghosts. Sometimes I go looking for them; sometimes they come looking for me. When you have haunted the Internet for as long as I have, the damned place seems littered with the corpses of fallen friends and foes, games and sites.
I used to like to go to a certain poker forum for two reasons. I like to see old Linden Arden, who I used to play with on PokerStars back in the day; and I am afraid to look at the Onlinechamp forum, if it even still exists.

The ghost of Onlinechamp is an instructional one. A couple of years ago, the biggest ring game online was $15/$30 limit high-low, then quickly after, the $30/$60 high-low. For arrivistes to the poker scene this probably seems incredible. After all there are games many times that size now, some even 15 times that size. But back then, unless you wanted to play King of Ding heads up on Ultimate Bet, these games were it. And because they were the biggest, they also attracted the maddest, the best, the worst. I played the games for quite some time, mostly out of ego as I doubt I made money. Not all of the casualties got broke — after all, Big Dave D is never seen on any sites now either — but a fair few got turned into ghosts along the way.

“El Ganador” was an infamous player, having destroyed the $10/$20 equivalent on Paradise Poker with a manic, insane-looking style. He evolved into a pot-limit Omaha expert. The clinically insane “DARTHVADER” seemed to spin off into the stars, although as a lottery winner in the U.S. he had money to burn.

My dear friend “LEECHKA” appears to have dropped off the end of the world. “ORION1” seemed to turn himself into a parody of every cold country maniac stereotype I ever took the piss out of, either riding the crest of a massive rush or crashing down to near broke-dom. Then there was “Alex1”, the tournament wizard and seemingly the worst cash game player I have ever played, and of course the infamous “Mr Robert”, who is now beating the $75/$150, probably chatting no more than five words a year, and still confounding the critics as to how he did it.

But in my mind the ghost of Onlinechamp overshadows them all. The first time I met “OLC”, as he was affectionately known, he was being praised by some anonymous railbird. Whereas today you can see this quite often, especially if it’s a well known player, back then it really stood out. As did his catchphrase, “ship the sherbet to Herbert” whenever he won a pot. Yes, he really did have a catchphrase.
This probably makes him sound quite annoying. Which he was. But he was also good fun and, as his rush continued, he built his own site, which for a time attracted some serious names from PokerStars including Josh Arieh.

Then the rush ended, and boy did it end. The rumour mill was he lost $60,000 in a couple of weeks, which effectively wiped him out. He sat in, and then sat out the entire time in the fledgling $100/$200 hold’em game, clearly just for showboating purposes. The website was the scene of a very public disintegration. Like one of those scenes in a disaster movie, where the support cables start to pop out of the ground, snaking and whipping around, as the building sways, while you watch and wait for the next snap. At times he seemed barely rational. I guess the end was a very public, lawyer-threatening bust up with Arieh.

Of course the tragic thing about this ghost is that if he had held on just a while longer, who knows what might have happened in the subsequent super boom. I mean people go to branded poker forum sites even though the person they are named after almost never posts there. I guess what haunts poor OLC most is that he would have almost certainly had a piece of Josh Arieh if they had still been friends, and that alone may have cost him up to $250,000.

I said that sometimes the ghosts come to me. Whilst looking at the aforementioned poker forum, I noticed a very strange post by a regular $100/$200 player. It seems that IMDB.com has an entry for Andy Glazer. For those who don’t know, this is a very comprehensive information site on movies, maintained by user submissions. Why on earth would the poker pundit have an entry there? as he had almost no involvement with the film industry except a cameo in the Stu Ungar movie.

This becomes even more curious if you check out the entry. There is a very comprehensive bio, as well as the mention of the date he died and the fact he committed suicide, which in itself is not well known. And who submitted this entry? Andy Glazer. A strange and chilling testimony.

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.