beat: friends writes article for school paper about me. i look like as

[wdead]

So a friend of mine interviewed me and CincyHR for an article about online gambling. She is a conservative Christian Scientist. Here is the article, which I will show in long form. Wow. Not my friend anymore.

A polygraph examiner wraps a blood pressure cuff around a tattooed arm, secures pnuemographs around a conspicuously buxom chest, and slips galvanometers around the person’s thick fingers.
“Okay, I’m going to be asking a serious of questions and I want you to answer me very truthful,” he says. “Are you a woman?”
“Of course I’m a woman,” he says impatiently, turning his head to reveal a moustache, ponytails, and a make-up tinted complexion.
The examiner looks over the chart and turns to his colleague: “He’s telling the truth. He really is a woman.”
As the man smirks and puckers his lips, the commercial’s trademark shriek sounds in:
“Ooooohh!!!! Good at bluffing? Play poker online at PartyPoker.com. It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s the world’s largest poker room.”
The ad campaign that ran non-stop on ESPN, during sports shows – “anywhere guys would be” – grabbed the attention of GW seniors Will and Dustin back in their sophomore year. They have since become online poker addicts, spending up to 20 hours a week playing eight hands on a computer screen, and making what they estimate to be about $30,000 each over the past two years.
“Party Poker was…amazing,” Dustin says. “Tens of thousands of people from around the world were just giving money away at all hours of the day.”
Dustin, who considers himself and Will as “definitely the best players at GW,” is talking about the drunk, underage, and/or amateur thrill-seekers who they took advantage of online. It was a scheme previewed by Dustin’s freshman year exploits in table poker, when he turned his room in Thurston into a 24-hour gambling venue.
“I made like $5,000 in my room,” Dustin says. “I was the only one who had ever played poker before, so I taught everyone on my floor how to play, and then took the money. It was a good scam.”
Will, who got into poker after watching tournaments on the Travel Channel, became one of Dustin’s more skillful apprentices. Once the freshman crowd dissipated, the two turned to the lure of Party Poker for the amateurs that had stopped coming to the table.
“If we were just playing table poker, we wouldn’t have access to the bad players we can get to online,” Will says. “When I go online I just look for random idiots I don’t know, or people who I know are idiots.”
What separates them from the “idiots,” he says, is having an intuitive understanding of simple math, (usually) not playing when they’re drunk, and treating the game like a business.
“It took me a while to get into the gambling money mentality, but you just calculate your risk. People work in the stock market, they find out the risk involved, and then buy or sell stocks. And in poker, yeah, there’s risk involved, but if you’re a good enough player, you can figure out how much risk,” Will says.

It started with Grandma
“Poker made Will a gambling addict,” Dustin says, “but I was a gambling addict before I ever played poker.”
Dustin started gambling when he was 7. Back in upstate New York, his grandmother taught him how to play five-card draw, and gambled with him for pennies.
Next, when Dustin was 8, his dad let him enter an NCAA March Madness pool at his office. He won the pool – $450 in all – but his dad kept the money for himself.
Dustin wasn’t discouraged. Instead, he took sports gambling into his own hands. He says he realized when the Giants were likely to lose, and then made bets with his friends that were Giants fans about the game.
“I’d get them all riled up by making fun of the Giants and saying how bad they were, and then, when they would be all, ‘They’re going to win! They’re going to win!’ I’d say, ‘Oh yea? I’ll bet you $10 that they won’t.’ I made a lot of money that way,” he says.
In sixth grade, Dustin set up a mini-casino in his bedroom, complete with a craps table, a blackjack table, and him – the house. His younger brother and the Nerkys – a little boy and girl that his parents watched after school – would come in to bet their allowance money. Dustin locked the door so his parents couldn’t see what was going on, but one day his brother slipped and mentioned in front of their parents that he had lost $120 in craps.
“They were like, ‘You lost $120? That’s so irresponsible!’ And I was like, ‘But I won $250 from the Nerkys!’ And that was the end of it. There was no more bedroom casino after that,” he says. “But somehow my brother and I ended up getting screwed, and the Nerkys made out like bandits.”
Dustin continued his gambling pursuits into high school, turning a deck of UNO cards in study hall into a game with $100 stakes.
“For some reason everyone I was playing with was terrible at UNO, which is like the simplest game ever, and I won so much money,” he says.
On the tails of his UNO success, Dustin turned to poker in his junior year. He first toyed with online gambling in high school, but would stick to honing his skills at the table until college.
“I put $15 in online poker with my dad’s credit card senior year of high school and lost it all. The first few times you put money online you just lose it all, ‘cause you don’t really know what’s going on.”

Cashing in
“I used to have thousands of Euros sitting in my drawer in Madrid. If my seÒora had found them there, I don’t know what she would think I was doing,” Will says.
He started “seeing results” from online poker when he was studying abroad last year in Spain. He had been visiting online poker forums, trying to improve his strategy by reading posts from more experienced players. One of them was Vanessa, a lesbian player who happened to also be in Madrid on a Fulbright Scholarship at the time.
“She was much, much better than me,” Will says. “She took me under her wing and taught me a lot about poker…like, don’t bluff morons, because they’ll call you with anything.”
Will’s new skills brought new profits.
“I could sit down and make $1,000 or $2,000 – in just an hour. I could also lose, but on average I would be winning a few hundred every time I played,” Will says.
With the money, he paid for trips around Europe and countless pitchers of sangrÌa. But the “ridiculous lifestyle” didn’t really start until he got back to the U.S., and with Dustin, Vanessa, and another player from the online forum, headed to Las Vegas for the summer.
They drove straight from Will’s home in Philadelphia to Denver – 37 hours on Interstate 80 without stopping, except for gas, food, and a highway trooper who banned Will from driving in Iowa. (He was driving 99 mph in a 53 mph zone.)
Once stopped in Denver, the gamblers fed their online addiction at the hotel. Will wanted to play in the World Series of Poker, but didn’t have the $10,000 that was necessary to buy into the tournament. So he entered himself in a $200 buy-in satellite tournament online. The winner would get to play in the World Series, live on ESPN from the Rio Casino in Vegas.
Will won.
“Lucky bastard,” Dustin says, and even Will admits, “It was all luck.”
He made it to the second day of the tournament, but didn’t win any money at the tables. What he did get was the option of four days’ hotel accommodations or $1,000 – he took the money, and stayed with another player who had chosen the room.
The rest of the time Will stayed with his poker buddies in a vacation house they rented south of the Strip. They spent their online profits on cab rides everywhere, $100 dinners three times a week, and many nights at the Spearmint Rhino strip club.
“Everyone that’s really good at this is just making lots of money and partying really hard,” Will says.

“Quasi-illegal bulls***”
The legality of online gaming has been largely disputed in the U.S., due in part to a Wire Act that prohibited the use of phone lines for betting in the early ‘60s. But with most gambling sites operating outside of the U.S., the craze only grew in the late ‘90s. Unable to prosecute the scores of gamblers who were betting online, the government targeted the site’s owners when they were found passing through the U.S.
This meant that online gambling for players like Will and Dustin was a relatively seamless process. They linked their bank accounts to Party Poker’s site, and could instantly debit money to play with, or transfer themselves the money they had won.
“It would take about five days to clear, and I would just have money in my account,” Will says. “It was that easy.”
But on October 13, 2006, the days of cashing in virtual chips for cold, hard cash were over. A last-minute provision added onto a port security bill blocked banks from processing anymore online winnings. Party Poker, operated out of Gibraltar, closed its site to American gamblers the next day.
“Party Poker is now illegal,” Dustin laments. “It’s really sad.”
It was a move by Conservative lawmakers to curb what they say is the sad part – sites like Party Poker preying on gambling addicts.
But the addicts have found their way around the new law, transferring winnings onto third party sites like ePassport, which in turn links funds to their banks accounts.
Dustin and Will now do their gambling on Poker Stars, an Aruban site that keeps all their money in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Neither of them has tried to cash in his current winnings since leaving Poker Party, but they say that when they do, Poker Stars will send them a check that the American banks can accept.
“They could legalize online poker and tax it and all these things that need to be done would be paid for by tax revenue,” Will says. “But now it’s all this quasi-illegal bulls*** that you have to deal with.”

Life as an addict
Dustin waits tables at Kramerbooks in Dupont, but it’s not for the money. He works a normal job to relieve the stress of poker.
“When you have a regular job and you’re thinking about your problems, it’s a problem at work, and I can deal with it there,” he says. “When you think about your problems at poker, your problem might be that you just lost $2,000, and that’s kinda hard to not think about.”
Poker has become an obsession – something that they think about when they’re out with friends, walking around campus, even sleeping. And for Will, it has changed his sleeping habits all together. If he’s on a “winning binge,” he’ll stay up and play, no matter what time of day it is.
“The 24-hour day means nothing to him,” Dustin says. “He’ll stay up for 30 hours, and then go, ‘Wow, I’m tired,’ and go to bed for 15 hours.”
Despite their addiction, the duo insists that online poker is a “blast,” and something they will eventually give up when they get tired of it. Dustin plans to move to L.A. when he graduates, using online poker to make a living while he tries to make it as a screenwriter. Will considered becoming a stock broker, but has recently decided he’d rather go into the Peace Corps in South America, where he can “play poker online…, do good stuff as well,” and put off his career choice until later.
But if Will said he was ready for South America, he’d be bluffing.
“I need to write my thesis. I need to apply to the Peace Corps, get a girlfriend, stop smoking. I need to work out….I haven’t worked out since I started playing poker.”
Will says this just before heading down to the computer lab in Phillips Hall for his daily ritual. He’ll download software so he can raise his bet with the scroll of the mouse, log into the online poker forum, and load four virtual tables onto the two, high-resolution 20-inch monitors. It’s sunny and 75 degrees outside, but Will will spend the next 3 _ hours in a basement, clicking his way out of $250.

[AntonHeat]

ahahh you got pwned

[NT!]

hahahhaahha i like how they identify duck as a lesbian poker player on a fullbright.

[cashme]

lol dude!

[BarryLyndon]

lol at getting pwned by a christian. Why would you EVER let this person do an article about you? It could have only turned out for the worst.

Call her up and ask her if she wants to play some 100NL at your place so she can conduct more research.

[Knight Vision]

seems she wrote what you said and did

[Dan.]

Holy [censored]! tl;dr. Cliff notes please.

[Autocratic]

Was this in the Hatchet?

[DING-DONG YO]

Cliff Notes: OP is a huge moran. His friend who happens to be a conservative Christian Scientist wrote an article that portrays online poker in a negative light.

Next time I'll take Rosie O Donnell to the firing range then get mad when she says I'm a pyscho gun nut on the View.

OP, you really are a thick mfer.

[MasterLJ]

[ QUOTE ]
Cliff Notes: OP is a huge moran. His friend who happens to be a conservative Christian Scientist wrote an article that portrays online poker in a negative light.

Next time I'll take Rosie O Donnell to the firing range then get mad when she says I'm a pyscho gun nut on the View.

OP, you really are a thick mfer.

[/ QUOTE ]

But you are a psycho gun nut.