Fake Recreation

A guilty pleasure of mine is playing poker. Three major obstacles thwart this as a form of recreation: I don't have any friends who play who are close enough to me to invite me in; I'm no good at it; and I don't have the money to lose even if I knew people and thought I could play.

Of course there's online games, but that only gets one of those obstacles out of the way. Well, there's play-money games to be found, but when anyone can click for more chips, they gamble idiotically. I may not be any great player, but I know you don't go all-in to see the flop. No pockets are that good. Also, if it's fake money, you're way, way more likely to get beat at the river.

But I occasionally go on a fake money site and play a few hands. It's mildly amusing in small doses, and playing against people is more interesting than playing against a machine. There's personalities, even if the play is distorted by the fact that it doesn't hurt to lose enough money to pay off your house on a single hand. Unless you're awfully attached to worthless cyber-chips.

But my most recent trip to the fake-money tables I saw a player who didn't have a personality, they had a fixed pattern. You could see in very few hands how this character was going to bet, and it wasn't that they were doing badly. Factoring the style of play with Monopoly Dollars and figuring pot-odds, probably a pretty rational way to play. Except too rational.

Come to find out, there's software you can use to play these games. It's a semi-sophisticated macro, I'm told, that bets for you. I'm sure it was developed to help people cheat at poker for real money, but some clown is using it for play-money.

Hello? What's wrong with this picture?

I realize online poker is of marginal value as recreation, but if you have to let your computer bet for you, isn't that kind of like faking an orgasm while masturbating?