Playing poker at work

[JFrank]

So, I played online poker at my software company for 2 years before I decided to quit to play full time. Despite 200+ employees at the plant, at least half on the technical side, and a big IT department, I was never even warned.

The funny thing about it is that our software did server management and computer performance monitoring and often conducted data collection from servers in-house! Call me lucky.

One thing that may have helped was re-naming the partypoker.exe process to pp.exe (after every software update).

[ChromePony]

So 2+2 is blocked for me at work, but I recently found out that if I open the page in the morning from home on my laptop I can browse around at work, I just cant open the homepage or any external links that lead to 2+2 once I'm there. Obviously I'm pleased with this find but I'm curious to know how bad of an idea taking advantage is...

[lyncks2002]

ok, let me explain my "setup @ work" [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]
first of all, get one copy of vmware workstation, install windows in that.
after you do that, install all other stuff needed for poker as in software and stuff.
get a dvd-rw and put that image on the dvd-rw
get windows power tools with the 4 desktop thingie "microsoft virtual desktop manager"
you get after that 4 desktops. you can switch between them with "windows" + 1 or 2 or 3 or 4.
until now we've setup the computer so that if ANYTHING happens you instantly shift+delete the image of the vmware machine and NO poker related software will be on your work machine.
after this you must do something really tricky for the internet to work in case you have a firewall.
you have two options: install at home a smallish linux server (which needs some knowledge) the other one is to get a router which can do crypted vpn
you get some vpn client (i use cisco vpn client) and connect to home device, traffic is crypted so no "poker" in it and voila.
and btw, i dont understand that traffic chart someone mentioned, poker traffic is REALLY small...

later edit: you can always use remote desktop to home, but it WORKS really slow and only a lot of bervebreaking will be going on (i tried that too).

[black_russian]

Personally I dont know how someone could do this morally. I guess some people are not required to work at work?

[JFrank]

[ QUOTE ]
Personally I dont know how someone could do this morally. I guess some people are not required to work at work?

[/ QUOTE ]

On the moral scale, this isn't very high, but then again it isn't that low either. Most likely the people taking advantage of it are talented enough to do adequate work in the eyes of their bosses in addition to "slacking off". The people doing it would probably be surfing the web, or just working less actively in other ways instead.

I'd say It all depends on whats important to you in within the realm of your career and your passion for it. In my case, the important thing was my earn rate.

[black_russian]

Im pretty sure gambling at work would constitute near instant firing at most major companies, like theft or violence. Maybe at smaller companies it depends on the boss/owner. I guess I could see some jobs that dont require you to spend all your time working but I know poker pretty much takes up all my consciuous thought when I am playing. Maybe I am wrong...in any event you wont catch me doing it.

[smartalecc5]

aren't you supposed to work at work?

[ActionFreak]

You can get a wireless broadband card for your laptop and use that to connect to the internet instead of going through your corporate lan.