You're right man, screw the written definition, who still uses that anyway!?! It's your definition that counts in this discussion, especially if that definition is based purely on opinion!

lol, I'm not going any further with this, it's just so stupid

This all started if I recall because a couple of riggies started spouting off and calling people communists, trying to equate "shills" to communists, because, you know us "shills" all work for the poker sites and we're just hired to be here to shoot down all these conspiracy theories that are totally true. Then somebody made a comment to the effect that they probably don't even know what communism really is, which led to this last page of baloney.

I don't support communism, I just find the riggies willingness to see things the way they want to hilarious. Anybody who doesn't agree with them is a hired gun or a communist or is part of the big bad conspiracy.

You are again confusing concepts.

Democracy does nothing of the kind.

It did nothing to protect the rights of millions of black Americans for many, many, years.

Even when they got the vote democracy did not prevent, for example, a far greater proportion of black Americans from being drafted to Vietnam.

And it does not stop poor people serving longer jail sentences, on average, than rich ones for similar crimes.

Plus, most Western democracies concentrate far too much power in the hands of big businesses who can buy the ears of politicians.

I don't think it's a goal so much as an inevitable consequence.

Yes, this I'd agree with. It's evident that communism can't work on the scale of an entire country. It might work on a village by village basis in an agrarian economies but not once you get to the point of needing a bureaucracy to keep things going.

Of course it didn't help that communism almost invariably started in a country as the result of a revolution so TPTP felt entitled to use strong arm tactics to prevent counter revolution.

Come on, it's way more fun than asking riggies for evidence and putting up the muppet pic in an endless cycle

All that are just abuses of the law within the 'democracy'. Democracy in modern times also means having a state of law which are applied.

In your black people example, segregation was within the laws of the time, but hanging / beating black people was clearly an abuse, breaking the laws which were simply ignored. It's not like everything in today's democracies happens in accordance to the will of the majority, perhaps only in Switzerland where they have referendums for everything.

If you want to stricly consider democracy as a system where the rulers are elected, fine. That's really not all that comes to mind for the vast majority of people when they think of democracy as a concept though, in my opinion.

Besides, when you think (as I do) that alot of power is placed into corporations and such (you can add powerful not elected instituions such as secret services, army etc. the amount of power they have differing from country to country), democracy by it's definition can't really exist anywhere because the population doesn't choose those people.

I'm not even sure about that. When there's a leader there's always the attraction of power and the temptation to abuse it, no matter how small the group on which the leader(s) operate.

In Eastern Europe it was forced, so the need for strong arm tactics would be even greater. But I don't think it has to anything to do with how it got there , it's just the basic idea of communism to destroy the country's elite in all areas and replace it with a new, obedient one. Or generally kill enough numbers of people so everyone will stay in line in fear of their lives.

I'm thinking that's the case because of Cuba for instance, that was a popular revolution with the genuine support of most of the population, yet they still went off and killed some thousands after coming to power. As a side note on that, all this Che Guevara idolatry there is today pisses me off, he was a mass criminal too after being a revolutionary hero.

You may well be right. But I don't think the particular system is really very relevant to that.

I think the big advantage of a capitalist type of system is that there is a clear and open path available to anyone to pursue wealth and what they can obtain by having wealth.

In the communist systems you still had a lot of people who were a lot better off than everyone else but joining that set involved arbitrary good fortune (being in the right job at the right time) and a great deal of very ugly nepotism and patronage.

In Nigeria they call themselves a constitutional democratic republic similar to the US, yet it is one of the most corrupt and violent governments in the world. Same for Sudan.

This thread has some of everything.

In rather the same was as some of the most repressed people in the world (or rather, their governments) describe themselves as 'freedom loving'.

It would be funny were it not so tragic.

This rings very true. There is the theory that a big part of the over-turn of communism in Romania - maybe all communist Europe - was that the influent people in power were tired of just being better off than most, they wanted millions of $$$, fancy cars, fancy houses etc. just like in the west.

Have you still not managed to find the door to Usenet and explain that Godwin has been summoned somewhere on the internet, and action needs to be taken?

Why are you still talking to me anyway, wasn't the rule of Godwin-invoking that the thread dies and the invoker gets ignored for all eternity?

No, thats not Godwin's law

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2...win.if_pr.html

"Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Have you still not come up with a riposte to when I called you out on your ******** 10 posts ago?

if there was ever hope for this thread to get locked, spiraling downward into a political debate is our chance! carry on, boys...

unfortunately as much as this thread should be locked, there would be no place to put all the dumb new rigged threads if it were

You wouldn't lock up a mental hospital because the patients were talking politics would you? Where would they all go?

This.

And this is even better.

What would be the advantage of locking it?

It keeps a lot of garbage that would otherwise clog up the forum in one place where it is easily avoided by anyone who's not interested.

Why anyone opens a thread that they believe should be locked is a bit of a mystery. A bit like going to a concert by someone you hate and then telling everyone that it's no good and should close.

For some it's more like the temptation of joining the gawkers at a train wreck.

My post was more of a joke than a serious statement...obviously this thread is needed for the rest of the forum to not be overrun by tards.

The last statement doesn't really apply because there is no music I could honestly say I "hate", and regardless...people have the right to experience things they find distasteful in order to form opinions. I have expressed way more than just the opinions on things I agree with in my days. So while your analogy could be a good one, it doesn't really matter because its nothing to make fun of someone for

If you play at Stars you HAVE TO KNOW that big stacks (especially towards the end of tourneys) get the breaks over small stacks. It is so freaking obvious, you are in serious denial or don't play much if you don't know this.

This is just an example but it is so typical of what happens constantly. I'm playing in a step tourney sit and go. 9 people started, 3 left. Small blind goes all in with about 4500 chips, big blind (me) calls with about 2900. I have tt, he has tks. Flop is jqa.

This happens so often people. The big stacks are given an enormous advantage over small stacks. Probably to get people off the tables and keep it moving. It's motivated by profit people, don't you know how greedy people get?

The sites could make it to where it is not so obvious. But they don't give a dam. People keep playing so they manipulate. The big stack advantage is so blatant and in your face, yet people love the game so much they will defend their only/most convenient/most addictive option until they turn blue.

It's like a criminal who has a mountain of evidence against him, but if the serial killer tells his momma he is innocent, she will defend his innocence like she knows for a fact he is innocent. To accept that her son is a criminal would destroy her.

Guys, the US government cheats to win all the time. What is stopping an unregulated poker company from doing the same thing. Its happened once, they got caught, and I'm sure its still going on. THEY ARE UNREGULATED AND CAN MANIPULATE THE PROGRAMS TO MAKE MORE MONEY IF THEY WANT, WITHOUT LOSING CUSTOMERS OR SUFFERING ANY BACKLASH, AND YOU THINK THEY AREN'T DOING IT?

...where to start?

ok, ill get it going (without the simple "lets see your evidence" line)

name one reason why a poker site would be motivated to end their tournaments faster by giving the big stacks advantage over small stacks...NAME ONE reason. I am confident that you cannot provide a SINGLE logical reason, and since you are the one making this claim the burden of proof is most certainly on you. So, I for one, would like to see one reason why a poker site would want to do this.

Kind of like you accepting that you suck at poker?

Why leave out the evidence, since the post you are replying to says that its "It is so freaking obvious" and "The big stack advantage is so blatant and in your face". Unless "blatant and in your face" is somehow subtle enough to not show up in stats

As much as I hate to argue the riggie's side, if tournaments are artificially ended early, by rigging in favor of the big stacks, then the players, winners and losers both, are more likely to play another tourney. Put another way, if you are a (single tabling for sake of simplicity) recreational player who has 3 hours to play SnGs, and each game lasts 1.5 hours then you will play 2 games if you get to HU in every game. If somehow the site can contrive to favor the big stacks, and the average game lasts an hour, (and you still reach HU every time) now you will have played 3 games and paid 3 entry fees instead of two.

[scrubbing entire body with bleach after expounding riggie argument]

Awesome...if that's the case, then it should be super, super easy for you to provide some evidence of this for those of us who don't play tournies on Stars and would want to avoid doing so if we knew this was happening.

I think the problem with that particular argument is that the volume increase is not substantial in terms of risk reward factors for any given site. Also, this type of big stack favorage would be ridiculously easy to prove if it were real. A site would not waste its time or risk its rep trying to get an extra 5 cents an hour out of recreational one tablers. There are other factors that make this a not so great reason albeit probably the most obvious...it just doesn't hold up logically very well if u go deeper

Can you account for other people posting in this thread and saying the exact opposite?



Oh also I've played something like 700,000 hands at Stars and everything I've checked stats wise was within the accepted deviation for the expected statistics.

How big is your sample? And how far outside the expected deviation were the results?