Online Poker vs The Planet of the Apes
Surely at one time or another everyone has witnessed a group of bourgeois canines playing anthropomorphic poker on one or the other of Cassius Coolidge’s series of paintings. But the man’s whimsical imagination wasn’t quite as far removed from reality as one might like to think. Perhaps you believe that chips and chimps do not go well together and that it sounds like something out of a Douglas Adams book, but if you ever played online against someone who had a great-ape photo for his icon, don’t be so sure it was just the excellent players irritating sense of online humor – you just may have lost a few thousand or more to an actual primate. If you thought using a stick to crack a walnut or a skull was the best an ape could do, in this early twenty-first century, when the world is on the verge of a Technological Singularity (think what an “intelligence explosion” can do to PC and online games), you, man or woman, had better think again.
Primate Programming Inc has found that great apes (who share 97% of DNA with us) are competent IT specialists and are employed by PPI. They enter a training program and upon graduation perform their services with PPI’s clients while demanding very low wages. Somewhere down the line, it was discovered that these employees also can be taught to play poker showing a particular knack for no-limit Texas Hold’em.
No-limit poker appeals to these employees because of their natural bent for playful (and sometimes serious) displays of aggression. PPI tells us that is this quality that makes them outstanding bluffers. Aggressive bluffing in no-limit games allows the player to bet it all at any time. This rule of the game requires edgy, aggressive behavior and the rather rare skill to bluff.
Since online poker games are anonymous, this helps our poker playing primates. You cannot determine who is of the human persuasion versus the ape persuasion. The human types have actually lost thousands of dollars to a player who played the early rounds with betting very little money and showed lame cards on a regular basis then out of the blue bet big time, of course, everyone in the game called, and the big time better revealed aces. Our winner was undoubtedly jumping up and down and pounding his chest in glee.
Apparently, and not coincidentally, the primate poker players early employment as computer programmers led them to independently, according to PPI, create programs to aid and abet their poker game. PPI is not talking about the specific contents of these programs. These apes could have a professional online poker career, but that is not their nature. Once outside the office, they will probably neglect their training and revert to being the real primates they are, propelling themselves with their arms from branch to branch and climbing fences. In any case as long as they are paid, fed and have their girlfriends and boyfriends nearby, they will continue with their poker games. Authors of no-limit poker books should take note. They may have to come up with some rewrites.
For the past several years, Norm McAuliffe, a Yale biology Phd and the scientist heading the research team behind the discovery of programmer apes, has been investing money and effort into a Primate Poker Inc, “hiring” profitable ape-players to play for money in rotating shifts, 24 hours a day. He has been quoted as saying: “I’m completely committed to this business model. It is reasonable to say I am “all in”.
The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker and receives Carbon Poker Rakeback from Rakeback Solution.
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