Let Sleeping Cats Snooze

In which we begin to uncover how a license to print money turned into a 28 billion dollar deficit.


As will be apparent from the frequency of posts on this blog, I have mellowed since turning fifty to the point where the stupidity of background events rarely causes me to comment. But just when I felt confident that intellectually I had curled up on a cushion, some damn fool came along and poked me with a stick.

The damn fool in question is slightly amorphous, but since I live in a land where corporations are people, it can be roughly identified as WSOPcom.

I'll use that rather ugly string when referring specifically to the online poker site. Not the website of the online poker site, because wsop.com, while sometimes appearing to be the site that you'd want to consult with queries about WSOPcom, will, at the press of a button, suddenly transform to the website covering the WSOP. And by WSOP I don't just mean what the WSOP meant for decades - a tournament series held in Las Vegas before it got so damned hot everybody wanted to stay inside - but also WSOP-C, WSOP-E, and WSOP-WTF.

The point being that one can be attempting to ascertain the e-mail address for Nevada support for WSOPcom and seamlessly get transported to a list of chip counts for a tournament in Prague. The wonders of modern technology.

When online poker returned to Nevada, I was one of the first to sign up at Ultimate. It was exciting. It was slightly less exciting when the game client showed all the sophistication of PokerRoom.com circa 2002. When it became apparent the traffic at the site was never going to crawl above horse-and-buggy status the word "exciting" became pretty much surplus to requirement, but I won a few tournaments and played some PLO8 cash and generally it was better than nothing.

Then WSOPcom launched. Ooooohhh. Shiny shiny!

I confidently predicted on one of those poker forums where 95% of the posts are "+1" "in before 'Doug Lee is a tool'" and "HU4rollz!!!" that the superiority of WSOPcom's software would bury Ultimate in a matter of months.

Eventually Ultimate did go tits up for a variety of reasons, but before that occurred many of us played there exclusively, shunning her prettier, younger sister like she had herpes.

Why?

Stay tuned.