Taken Down

I checked out the site that had been ripping off my content this morning, and see that it's now automatically redirecting traffic to a site featuring something called "Free TV Porn."

Takedown Notice

I was trolling through my Statcounter history earlier this week and noticed that somebody out in the UK actually went through the trouble of doing a Google search for the term 'thebabykicker.' On a lark, I decided to do the same search to see what I could come up with.

Most importantly, I found that my site was ranked first. I would have been kind of sad if it hadn't been. (: Disturbingly, however, I came across the site http://islandchronic.duskdiary.com/, which specializes in ripping off my blog entries and posting them verbatim as his own. Asshole!

I contacted my girlfriend at work to tell her that my blog entries were being boosted. She checked out the site, and informed me that she was convinced that the thief was a chick based on the background image. Beeotch!

I used the duskdiary software to flag the islandchronic site as a copyright offender even though I knew damn well that I wasn't going to get the material removed that way. I gave it a couple of days (really, until I had a free hour this evening) to work, but of course nothing happened to the content.

So, I trolled over to Wikipedia to find out about takedown notices. Turns out that by doing a quick Whois search (thanks, Network Solutions!), I was able to figure out that GoDaddy hosted the site (no surprise that a hosting provider featuring those stupid SuperBowl commercials would harbor a site that boosts my blog entries).

The Wiki entry pointed to a government copyright website that contains information on who I could contact at GoDaddy to ask them to remove my material. I found out that the person I needed to contact was Ben Butler. Using the bullet points from the Wikipedia entry, I crafted this email (featuring my real info ;) ) to Mr. Butler asking him to remove my content from the duskdiary.com website:

Mr. Butler--

My name is thebabykicker, and I am contacting you regarding copyrighted material posted without the copyright holder's (my) consent on the duskdiary.com site hosted by GoDaddy.com. The copyrighted material is blog entries exclusively hosted on my site at http://thebabykicker.blogspot.com/.

The infringing material is hosted on the main page at http://islandchronic.duskdiary.com/, and the entries are entitled:
Difference in big-stacked play online
Bad Play Late in the Tournament
I Missed the Free Card
Now Offering Pre Natal Health Information
Eight Fingers of Johnnie Walker Black, Please
Increasing Organizational Efficiency
Important announcement from Titan Poker to United States Residents
Where did all the Young Players Go?
The Hole in my Cash Game
and
I Strangle Donkeys

These are all verbatim copies of entries that I have made on my blog referenced above (http://thebabykicker.blogspot.com/) over the course of the last two years. I have not authorized the owner of duskdiary.com or any other agent to post these entries at the duskdiary.com website.

Under penalty of perjury, I state that I have a good faith belief that use of the material described above on the duskdiary.com website is not authorized by the copyright owner (me) or the law.

Under penalty of perjury, I state that the information described in this notification is accurate, and that I am qualified to act on my own behalf at the copyright holder of the infringed blog entries described above.

Please accept this email as a request to remove the copyrighted material from the http://islandchronic.duskdiary.com/ main page as soon as possible. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by email to thebabykicker@gmail.com, or by phone at 619-767-2676. Thank you for your time and rapid assistance.

--tbk

I'm curious to see if my material will be removed in a timely manner. I'm guessing that since I'm not the RIAA or MPAA, I'll have my request summarily ignored. At least I can take some comfort in the fact that the musings I post here are valuable enough for some asshole or bitch to steal and try to pass off as their own.

Time to Start Thinking about the World Series

I've noticed that Full Tilt has started promoting their WSOP giveaways pretty heavily. It's occurred to me that soon, the only way for American players to get cashouts in the future will be to take them in the form of B&M tournament entries. Instead of resisting this trend, I've decided to embrace it.

Between now and June, I'm using the last of my cash on deposit to try to $4 satellite my way to the main event. Railbirds welcomed.

Bot-Rockin' Followup

After sending off a list of suspected bots to UB's customer support, I received emails from both Ricky and Zoltan notifying me that they'd begun an investigation. Three weeks later, 5 of the bots were suddenly 'disappeared' from the tables. Just as quickly as they had disappeared, new bots popped up to take their places.

I've come to realize that it's not terribly annoying to play against them. Their blinds are mine for the taking, and every time they have a hand, the either raise or push all-in. They never limp, so I try to get them on my left so I can put in a small raise preflop to take down their blinds with minimum risk, or to become last to act on the flop. If I get reraised, I know to get out of their way.

It's actually been a bit of a learning experience for me. I've been playing my cards less and my position and the situation more. For example, I was playing a table with a suspected bot two positions to my left. The table was extremely soft, so I had been raising with any two whenever it was folded to me in late position, and was taking down blinds without resistance. After nearly 40 hands, I had won 45% of the pots. I knew my non-bot opponents were getting tired of me taking down so many pots, and were looking to lay some traps.

Once again, it was folded to me in the cutoff where I had A9. I made it 4BBs to go. The player behind me and the bot in the SB both folded, but the human in the BB called. The flop came TT2, and my opponent put in a min bet. This looked very weak to me, so I decided to simply call and see how weak he was on the turn. A Queen turned, and the BB laid another min bet into me.

I'm familiar with a play where one calls a bet on the flop with the intention of raising on the turn and following up on the river with a half-pot bet. This situation requires a scary-looking board and a scared opponent. Is this such a situation?

I knew the guy didn't flop a set. Nobody calls a late position raise from the BB and then makes min bets all the way down into an aggressive player like me. I sensed weakness from the blocking bets on the flop and turn. The Queen is a great card in this situation, because if I raise here, it will look like I hit that Queen and have taken the lead from Ace high or a small pocket pair.

I make it 3.5BB to go, and get a quick call. He quickly checks the brick on the river, so I put in my half-pot follow-up bluff. He quickly mucks, showing JJ.

Typically, however, I can take down a pot with a preflop raise to become last to act, and follow up with a bet on the flop to take down the pot. Tight bots + weak humans = +EV.

I Narced

After posting my last entry, I spent some time identifying the most obvious bots in my player database, and sent a request to customer support asking them to look into some of the most eggregious offenders. After waiting 24 hours for a response, I sent another request. At 4:30 yesterday afternoon, a good 36 hours after sending my first report, I got a response from Luis, who said that he'd forward my request to the appropriate department. 8 hours after that, Ricky from the Security Department wrote me to let me know that they have opened an investigation into the matter, and will take appropriate disciplinary action if they detect that anyone has broken their poker code.

As I'd observed in my previous post, the bots generate rake, so I don't imagine that they'll be looking too hard to find violations of their "poker code." WTF is a poker code, anyway? Does it include the words, "Leave no chip behind?"

If I thought the check could be deposited at my bank, I'd ask them to send me an immediate cashout. Instead, I'm stuck at the whims of Ricky to recognize the swarm of bots at his whim.

Penny Ante Bots

I was watching an interview the other night. Dan Fouts was talking about the 5 Super Bowls he won for San Diego in the 70s and what he'd been doing since disappearing after his retirement. Apparently, he'd invented a "game," an automaton, really, in which he loaded "rules" into a 5x5 matrix, let some algorithm crunch numbers for a while, and figured out who the winner was. It was as if Stephen Wolfram's doorstop had had the effect on the US in the last 5 years that poker has enjoyed.

I woke up from this odd dream and almost immediately realized that something strange was afoot at the poker tables. For a couple of weeks, I had been noticing that players had grown really tight. The GameTime window in Poker Tracker had been observing 2-4 players at every table with VP$IPs in the 5 to 9 percent range. Very odd. The players I had been playing for the last few years were couched in the 20-40% range, and usually deviated from that range to the right. Even the tightest multi-tablers had at least a 15% VP$IP. What's worse, I couldn't seem to avoid these players. Play for an hour after work, and there they were. Catch a few hands before work, and they'd be there. Sneak in an orbit or two during lunch, and what do you know? Every table had at least two super-tight players that I'd recognized.

What's worse, the strategies were predictable. First, the bot would fold at least 90% of the hands dealt. Second, if the bot had a hand, they'd raise the pot if there was nobody in in front; otherwise, the bot would move all in. Third, if the bot saw a flop and had an overpair, TPTK, or a set, they'd just move all in. That's it; that's their strategy. Simple enough, but tough to beat unless you want to risk your entire stack on a coinflip.

As I laid in the dark at 3 the other morning, I knew there was only one plausible explanation: bots. All the paranoid predictions of hordes of bots being unleashed on unsuspecting players seems to be coming true. At least they're only playing their own hands, and not figuring out mine. For now, anyway. I suspect that feature will be added over the summer, with the feature of playing the player and not the cards coming online by the end of the year.

Curious to see if my realization was correct, I rolled out of bed and logged into UB, and sure enough, my typical companions were at the tables. I sat down, played tight, and stole blinds when I could. That worked for a few orbits, but then my human opponents started opening up their games and seeing more flops. Because the bots and I were playing tight, the other players were effectively playing six handed. I was raised out of pots by all assortment of ragged trash. I managed a double-up against a bot when my JJ outlasted the bot's AK, but otherwise the game descended into the typical micro-limit chaos I'm accustomed to.

I'm considering sending a list of bots to customer support, but really, how do I put it? "Hi, I've been doing some datamining on some of your players, and am suspicious of all these players with VP$IP < class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">PokerTracker to a few hundred hands and notice that a few players are on constantly and only play the nuttiest of nut hands, why can't UB be proactive and find these bots before they get out of hand? By not policing its players better, UB is encouraging bot makers to continue to work to improve their bots. If UB allows this to go on long enough to become a well-publicized issue, the few remaining players may pick up their chips and flee the online casinos in favor of the land-based ones. And as Greg Giraldo asks in that Lazyboy song, "if that disappears, where does that leave me on a Friday night with my new high-speed connection?"

You know what? I've convinced myself. I'll fire off an email and hope they start looking for these damned bots without me prompting them to in the future.

New Year, New Job

I moved to San Diego a year and a half ago after accepting a job testing software for the auto collision repair industry. The work wasn't terribly interesting, and trying to get anything done was a really frustrating experience. I began looking for a new job this past summer, and interviewed for a test engineering position at a TV manufacturer this past August. After four months of occasional phone calls from the recruiter telling me that the manager was interested in hiring me, I pretty much told her to tell the manager to offer me a position already so I could get the hell out of the stifling position I was in. A week later I was offered the job and subsequently gave my two weeks notice. Happy New Year, I'm leaving.

Anyway, I started working at the new job a couple of weeks ago extending an automated test suite in order to test a new line of TVs that is due to be released some time this year. The suite had been written by the time I got there, so it was just a matter of hacking up the code to work with the UI of the new TVs. It's a lot of work in Python and C++, both of which suck, especially after programming in Ruby for the last year or so. In spite of the languages I have to work with, however, I'm having a great time working in a very small group. I'm getting a lot done in a day, and I'm not stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire. And I'm earning 30% more an hour, which is just icing.

I've been in the process of moving from my old shitty apartment into a newly remodeled one close to the new job, and unfortunately haven't been able to spend any time clearing my bonus over at Full Tilt. After hearing that Neteller wasn't going to accept transfers from US players anymore, I was concerned the fish would have left. Fortunately, that wasn't the case, and it seemed like FT was as busy as ever. Within the first 5 minutes of sitting down this evening, I got my queens paid off by KT on a ten high flop. Yep, there's still dead money on the tables, much to my relief.

I'm hoping that once things settle down with the new job and apartment that I'll be able to spend some more time at the tables. I won't be clearing that bonus at FT before it expires, but hopefully the influx of new players will continue to be profitable without bonus whoring.

Already Broke my New Year's Resolutions

Old habits die hard, I guess. I played 5 No Limit tables at Ultimate Bet rather than working on my bonus at Full Tilt, limping with connectors and gappers from all assortment of bad positions and never hitting, and worse still, I played a damned freeroll over at Full Tilt. 180 players competing to qualify for 2 positions in a quarter final tournament. I bubbled after nearly two and a half hours. I'm grumpy about dumping all that time into a losing endeavour, however, I'm happy that I managed to get third. Maybe I should try my hand at another tournament and try to stick to my old tight assed tournament strategy for a change.

Well, at least I broke the resolutions early. It would have sucked to diligently stuck to my resolutions for a week or more before flagrantly disregarding them.