Kathi's Page

Game Experience

I started playing Full Tilt Poker while I was sick over Spring Break. It gave me something to do while I was lying in bed and watching basketball. After a few hours, I found I was so engaged in it that I couldn't play while I was doing something else like instant messaging or lurking on Facebook.
I downloaded Full Tilt Poker at the recommendation of a friend who plays a lot of online poker. Never really having played poker before, I thought it would be fun to learn. He told me Full Tilt would be a good program because it is one of the only ones where you can play with play money and people will still take it seriously.

http://www.fulltiltpoker.com

Before I logged in for the first time, I had no idea that online poker involved a sense of identity. I had to choose a user name for others to see as well as an avatar. I chose a cowgirl with blond hair to best represent me. After playing for a while, I realized I often was intimated by other players based on their avatar. If someone had the mean looking shark I just unconsciously assumed they were one of the better player's at the table.

In retrospect, I think the avatar is more like a representation of one's self, not really identity. You can be one of many things, including animals like frogs and sharks. I really think that this could be so random, just something you like. You can't really enter any personal information about yourself, unless you do it through chat in a game. The only thing you can do is change "poker faces". I didn't realize Full Tilt even had this feature until I had been playing for about a week.

I thought it would be interesting to try another representation and see if I received different response. I did. Here I am as a cowboy with the name F-embucky (hey, it was March Madness).

Before my in-class presentation, I played all Texas Hold 'Em with play money to try and up my number of chips. My first game I was pretty much clueless. I asked other players to explain the buy-in to me. Even things that I didn't ask about came very quickly to me. If you understand how to play poker, then the game is EXTREMELY user-friendly. Once you pick a table, you visit the cashier. You can get up to 1,000 chips every five minutes, so it doesn't really matter if you lose all of your play money, you can get more very easily. The only problem is when you are out of chips you have to leave the table, so it might take a few minutes on the waiting list to get back on to another table.

After the in-class presentation I thought it would be beneficial to try other games at Full Tilt. So I joined a few different Omaha High/Low and Razz. I had never played these games before and so I was pretty confused. I had spent a long time building up my chips and then basically lost it all, to much dissatisfaction. They all pretty much look the same, except in Razz only 8 players can play instead of 9.

One reason I'm not very good is that there is not a whole lot of strategy involved. Sometimes people will just come to a table and go all in without even seeing the flop, or the first 3 cards that are shown by the dealer. When you play at a limit table like I have, which is 300, you can lose or gain a lot of chips pretty quickly.

The chat feature is a very important one in the game. It always remains in the bottom left hand corner of the table window, unless you decide to make it bigger. Here, you find information from the dealer including who has won what hand with which cards, the size of the pot they won, and when people are running out of time to make a play. But the chat is also used between players. There is a dialogue, a set of abbreviations that players use to compliment one another. When I first started playing, I had to state that I was new and ask people what these abbreviations mean. One user was very helpful.

However, sometimes the chat can be used for more personal talks, or to trash talk. Usually, this stays pretty clean. But sometimes you get a user who chooses to use profanity that is completely unrelated to the game. The following is part of a chat transcript in which the user decided to attack some of the players at the table based on their user names and avatars. He made fun of one player whose avatar was wearing glasses and another's whose name had Corvette in it. In this case, there are a few options an offended user has. 1. You can turn off the chat feature, kind of like blocking the player. The only thing with this is you lose contact with the dealer. 2. You can leave the table and play at a different one without the annoying user. 3. You can sit out the hand and wait for the player to leave. This is what my table did. We all sat out until the player left on his own because no one would play with him. I was disappointed by Full Tilt because there was no way to warn or report this player to the authorities on the site.

Game Analysis

Many of the overarching aspect of the Internet discussed in class relate to online gaming and Full Tilt Poker. Identity, community, participatory culture, and geography can all be discussed through Full Tilt terms.

Identity: Identity in Full Tilt Poker can be seen as more of a representation. All you have is your avatar and your username. While my username has part of my last name and my avatar is female with blond hair, there is not much you can tell about me. One thing I did do was create an alternative representation with a more masculine name and a male avatar. The response I received was different. Through comments I got more "NH"'s and people referred to me as a he. This is an example of identity tourism on the web and showed how misleading these representations can be.
Community: While there is a distinct locale as well as a specific set of rules that Full Tilt players need to understand to enjoy the game and be successful, I would not say that Full Tilt is a community. There are too many players in different games and at different tables, and there is not enough communication, despite the common interests.
Participatory Culture: A search on YouTube retrieved thousands of results of people who made mash-ups, recorded themselves playing, and shared strategies to cheat. Some of the other videos were instructional and aimed to help other players, regardless of the table or pot size. I did not expect there to be so much self-published material online, but the realm of participatory culture stretches far and wide on the Internet. Check some of my favorites out below!
Geography: Why go to a casino to gamble when you can do it at home in your pajamas? I had many discussions with different players about this idea, including some international players. Together with the Internet, Full Tilt poker is eliminating geography. There is less of a reason to physically travel and more to move through the web.

Fun Stuff

Here are some YouTube videos I used to help with my game play. I found these when working on my Practicum Paper.

A look at the software in a review and codes for more chips:

And how to hack the system:

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