The Chinese

[Iq75]

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This is hardly new. Virtual economies exist/existed in a lot of popular online games and MMORPGS (Everquest, Ultima, WoW) Even on a smaller scale such as Diablo II people had sites that sold virtual items where basically a website is created by 10 geeks who do item/gold runs all day and sell it for money. I'm not really up to date with any of that anymore, but I'm assuming they are still abundant now.

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I too knew that there are some people harvesting virtual gold and selling it. But i thought that the amount of people doing this for full time job is minimal (like 3-4 nerds in the whole world not counting the underaged ones that do it in summertime). I was just amazed that there actually was literally tens of thousends of this people doing this for living.


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It's different to employ people at no risk to do these things than to fund them money like in poker where they could potentially lose it. Also, they would be in indirect competition with each other, unlike games where they each profitably get their gold/items.

Might as well worry about 2+2 forums/books educating fish.

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If somebody would do it right, i think that there would be very minimal risk at first. One could hire 10 of the most mathematically talented people out of the Warcraft bunch. After that they could give them 1 week worth of lessons and make them read the books. Then make them play 100 000 play money hands (they could sell the play money chips). If a person A is making 10bb/100 or more move him to 0.01/0.02, if not then fire his sorry ass and hire a new worker. After that 100 000 of 0.01/0.02 and so on and so on. In some point a worker would be high enough at stakes that it would be worth keeping him playing in the X level eventhough his not making enough bb/100 to move him to a next level. And considering that they only pay the Warcraft players 60$/month they would not have to play in a very high level to be profitable to the company (60$/300h in a month --> 0,2 $/h to break even). Obviously if a lot of companies would do this in a higher scale, there would emerge a lot of talented players who could beat the higher stakes. And a seriously large number of profitable mid/small stakes grinders.


To all,
there has been some comments on this thread that i should not be too worried about the possible chinese impact on poker. Well to tell you the thruth i'm not that worried. It could take years before anything happen. The chinese market could also bring millions of fish too to balance the negative effect of the chinese sharks (the fish/shark ratio might even improve). Their goverment might enforce the ban of online poker so hard that in the future there might not be any chinese players on pokersites. Who knows whats going to happen. I read the article, thought it was interesting and wanted to discuss my thoughts about the possible impact of these facts to the future of poker. And at the same time point out to those who think that China is going to create a new poker boom in the near future, that it most certainly is possible that the chinese might actually make the games worse.

[wet work]

We could do this right here in America! Buy a bunch of orphans, I bet they're pretty cheap. Give them each $100 on their account. For every $10 they lose, there goes a finger.
I guarantee once a few fingers go the whole team will become winning players. Or else! I don't think I need to mention the penalty for going busto.

[viper930]

[ QUOTE ]
We could do this right here in America! Buy a bunch of orphans, I bet they're pretty cheap. Give them each $100 on their account. For every $10 they lose, there goes a finger.
I guarantee once a few fingers go the whole team will become winning players. Or else! I don't think I need to mention the penalty for going busto.

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LOL

[AntonHeat]

[ QUOTE ]
We could do this right here in America! Buy a bunch of orphans, I bet they're pretty cheap. Give them each $100 on their account. For every $10 they lose, there goes a finger.
I guarantee once a few fingers go the whole team will become winning players. Or else! I don't think I need to mention the penalty for going busto.

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ahah thats sick

[puckle]

Bring on the Chinese!!!

They are nutso gamboolers who, for the most part, will be more inclined to use superstition than Sklansky to make their decisions at the poker tables. C'mon these are the people who gave the world the glorious science Feng Shui and the amazing philosophy of Falun Gong for crying out loud!

Luckily for us, Mason, according to his Publisher's Note in the January edition of the 2+2 Internet Magazine, has not yet closed a deal to translate the 2+2 opus into Mandarin (or Russian or Hindi).

Yes, in recent weeks I have noticed their presence on Stars and Party.

Sooooo.....lets light the incense, kneel before the Buddha and pray that the Chinese will play poker in preference to blowing up satellites.....or New York.

Regards,
puckle.