[sawseech]

i'm gonna shine some light on this cockroach because i feel that he deserves it and because i'm in a position to do it and because i have the moral authority to do it.

liquid`nazgul was a good bw player who achieved some moderate success as a player. he founded teamliquid.net and, though the strength of his ability as an administrator and beancounter, established a community which drew the best and brightest of the english-speaking bw community.

over time, he showed a lack in judgment with regards to forum policy and towards maintaining the health of the online bw community, but his lack of judgment was largely offset by the presense of those who were morally beyond reproach. i'm talking about outstanding human beings such as liquid`drone, waxangel, mensrea, and fakesteve.

so, eventually, he de-facto recused himself from the site and conceded control. he started playing poker and enjoyed some success and founded liquidpoker.net. due to his nature, he actively excluded the participation of the above stated outstanding people in this new community.

when this new community started, i was one of the first onboard. i believed that nazgul's intent was to create a community of strength and that he believed in the legitimacy of the game of poker, and that he cared about the advancement of the game as the next logical step for former broodwar players. i believed that he would put the community first, and i had no objection to him getting paid for his efforts through rakeback or partypoker affiliate status or anything else. other former broodwar players followed suit, most notably rekrul, bigballs, elky, liquid.venice, x'ds~grrrr..., mockturtle, ntt, and smuft.

time passed.

when pooruser joined the community, he came out of nowhere. my take on him was that he was a personal friend of nazgul who had enjoyed minor success. i blinked, and he had gone from playing the 0.25/0.50nl games on pokerstars to playing 10/20nl hu with hallingoll and rekrul and the like and demonstrating what i felt to be was an unnatural excess of survivability given what i perceived to be his emotional capacity and intelligence and street-to-street competence. please bear in mind that i am an outstanding judge of character and poker survivability.

others materialized, seemingly out of nowhere, and all became liquidpoker.net admins, and the community started to change. rekrul is a brilliant guy and i think he felt it. i was focused on overcoming my programming and moving towards making better use of my tools as a player. bigballs was starting to get it and was in a similar place. ket was on his way to a total mastery of himself and his game.

rekrul insulted a fish, probably while drunk. he was banned.

i questioned the ban. it made no sense. rekrul had been a part of liquidpoker.net from day one and was the marquee attraction. he was one of the reasons why i bothered to continue posting on the site in spite of a clear fishification of the forums and threads.

think back to when you really sucked at poker. for me, the example would be when i first started playing the game and the biggest stakes available on pokerstars was the 3/6nl game, in which tillerman reigned supreme. now, imagine that a community exists in which you can interact with tillerman, without reservation or barrier. you have a direct line to tillerman and other clearly skilled players, many of whom are actively interactive and thoughtful and honest. would you visit this site?

these fish would ask for advice. rekrul would advocate a strong, attacking style of play. nazgul and pooruser and others began to undercut rekrul's advise which he usually gave in good faith.

rekrul's ban expired and he posted inflammatory remarks about nazgul as being a greedy [censored]. i figured he was drunk, but defended his right to post, given what i felt was an unjust banning. this time, rekrul was not banned, but the undercutting continued, only worse.

now, rekrul is a sportsman. he's not a poker player, or a materialist, or anything else. he lives to compete. he's a warrior. i'm the same way. more to the point, he is rational.

now, nazgul doesn't suck [censored] at poker. neither did the other administrators. they were all undercutting him. me and tom and bigballs and ket and baal were trying to figure out what the [censored] was going on, because the forum interactions had taken on an unnatural tone.

i figured it out in the blink of an eye. nazgul's behavior was not consistent. why would you undercut a rekrul? if nothing else, he merits consideration. nazgul had (effectively) been posting that rekrul sucked at poker and should not be taken seriously as a poster or as a player. pooruser and others followed suit, and the forum began to split.

pca started. with most of the cancerous elements of the community away on a sunny beach after having busted out really fast, i was able to take stock of the community. i began to question the "realness" of forum posters; by that i mean that i started to question whether it was possible for the posters who had demonstrated an unnatural lack of judgment given basic strategic concepts (ie. postflop aggression in poker) to have been posting in good faith. i decided that they could not possibly have been posting in good faith. i then noticed that ALL of these posters were also liquidpoker.net admins, had NOT been a part of the bw community, and also demonstrated unusually loyalty to, as well as an affinity for the unnatural positions held by nazgul.

their goal was not the community. their goal was to create a community which contributed to the overall survivability and non-promotion of fish.

if you are a rakeback provider, you want your player to win 0.1/BB per 100 hands. that is the ideal. nazgul and his crones were continually advocating a pathetically weaktight approach to the game. talentedtom started to wonder why the [censored] nazgul was, suddenly, being an [censored] to him. PITF was banned for insulting a fish. rekrul made a series of heartfelt and tactically brilliant posts, and was denigrated for it.

it became clear to me that nazgul was operating a commercial poker website under the guise of a community in which you can interact with rekrul. i left.