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My real-life brother is a good poker player. Both live and online he has had some decent results. He doesn’t play much anymore mostly due to scheduling and work, but when he does, he still does ok.My other “brother” loves to play poker. He’s really my oldest friend and his name is not Gary, so I will call him Gary. We were blood brothers when we were ten and we are still brothers. On his parents’ farm in New Jersey he has all the time in the world and plays often. Since we were small boys playing for candy and baseball cards, I have only seen him win anything at all three times. Gary is just not a winner. <READMORE>
The real problem is that Gary plays on my account online. At completely random times I have logged in to find myself already involved in a hand or registered for some upcoming game. All sense of brotherhood aside, this is killing me.
Does this sound familiar to you? Do you have somebody who wouldn’t know Pocketfives from Google leeching off your account? If so then I think it’s time we all took a serious look at what our “friends” are doing to us.
First and foremost, there is the matter of lost money. I keep very careful financial records and I’ve found that Gary has cost me over 20% of my poker income over the last four years. And this is just from an honest guy who always loses at the felt. Every day we see another post about somebody whose account got hacked. I can’t help but wonder how many of those accounts were emptied by so-called friends who are really not that honest or just got tempted by the money.
Next there is the lost prestige. From sharkscope to the rankings on pocketfives, there are many ways that our results as poker players are tracked these days. This is not a personal issue for me, but many of us are as motivated by these rankings as we are by the bottom line. I’m sure that having a losing player or two using your account cannot look very good on your stats.
And where once it may have sometimes even been helpful to have at least one guy you could trust to take over your tournament if you had a sudden emergency, today this may just get you into real trouble. In the wake of the recent poker scandals involving players using accounts other than their own, many sites have begun to crack down on anything that even looks like impropriety. Try explaining that one to pokerstars support when you get that email telling you that they have frozen your account.
So what can we do about this? After all, these losing deadbeats are our friends. We can’t just give them the big brush off, can we?
I call for an uprising against the Poker Gary’s of our world. At the very least we can explain to them that the poker sites won’t let one account have more than one IP address anymore. If we grumble about how this meshes with our playing on our laptops and at Mom’s house and how the cheaters are to blame, it might fly. We can even let them play a cheap game at our house once in a while as a token gesture.
For those of us who are made of sterner stuff, there is always the brutally honest approach. If your heart is not completely hardened, you can always soften the blow by telling him in between bong hits, but there are those who feel that straight up is always best. Usually these people are the same ones who say you should just rip off a band-aid in one good pull.
No matter how you choose to do it, I say the time has come and it must be done. And to that end, I have written a poem:
Poker Gary, you’re my brother.
And I love you like no other
guy could love another guy.
But it’s time to say goodbye.
Over the years you’ve had some fun.
But as of now your fun is done.
So please find another game.
One at which you’re not so lame.
And so Gary just let me say
I really wish that you could play.
But since you suck and lose my dough,
Goodbye my friend, you have to go.
Now if I could only get him to read this article…
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