I just put 250 on bovada with my visa card. From my glance at the Internet Poker forum it is one of the better sites for withdrawal.

The poker boom's most important ingredient was TV and hole card cameras IMO.

And sunglasses at the table.

I play there every night. not a ton of .10/.25 or .25/.50 PLO tables but enough bad players to make it worth it to play for an hour or two every night.

just got a check from them yday, took 19 days from request to my house. last check in December took 21 I think.

if you want to cash out via WU you have to deposit that way but there's a fee..

but yeah, I don't multitable I just play one table low stakes for something to occupy an hour on the weeknights, so my experience may be different than yours..

I agree with this

Disingenuous, TV was the key ingredient because everyone wanted to be all the poker "pros" they saw on there or the up and coming poker "pros"...... Not donk around with people of equal skill level while the house slowly took all their money.

I put on only 20 to see how it goes. But 20 is so dumb.

Bovada is fine if the amount of money you have on there isn't significant to you. You will get it back.... most likely, and it may take a little longer than you expected and may have to return bounced checks.

Well, I'll put more than 20 then.. don't mind it being slower, not like I'll be paying bills with it.

They just send you checks and they sometimes bounce? How much do they charge?

Not sure I agree with this. I think it shows the tricky aspect of the game really well - these guys bluffed and made someone with a really good hand fold, other times suckered someone into calling with a weak hand etc. Being able to see both cards really helps. Thinking you are clever and poker letting you use that to your advantage is a big part of the appeal.

Ya, but TV still helped in the sense they don't show you folding for 90 minutes ever.

That too.

My point is that a hell of a lot more than "I could become a pro!" is going on. Showing all the exciting hands, making it look like they're far more common than they really are, is definitely one of the benefits.

but that's pretty much his initial point though, tv and holecard cams made everyone at home think "I can do that, I can pull huge bluffs and look at how bad some of these guys are.". It was always about people thinking they could outsmart others, not so much about playing the lottery with some cards in your hand.

Sigh

If it was just TV, why didn't Blackjack TV or any other card game TV shows ever take off? ****, just put anything on TV and create a huge new market, ez game.

I can actually understand the point in an illegal environment where depositing and withdrawing is a huge cost for the sites, and to an extent also makes the fish's money trapped on the site (still able to withdraw it, but usually too much of a pain to bother with unless they roll it up). But in a legal environment, it seems short-sighted.

Poker is interesting to play/watch on TV b/c it allows for so much variation in play. This is related to your ability to "outplay" people, but it's also relevant in the tv context to how much surprise the game has for the viewer. Blackjack is boring, b/c there is a clearly correct way to play; in poker you rarely know in advance what the right play is when watching on tv given the larger context in which each hand occurs.

This is fair.

I guess my problem with this line of argument is that I don't think they'll ever be able to make it so that few players win and almost everyone is a .5-2 bb/100 loser. In reality it won't ever be craps with cards.

not only that, but its impossible to make it so a bunch of players win and get promoted to a point where they ultimately give back their profits due to initially being overwhelmed or not adjusting but are breakeven players in the long run. pretty much every player except those playing for a living would be ok sitting down and being told that their oponents are of a skill level such that they are unlikely to lose at a rapid rate due to professionals playing alongside them, but may win or lose at a decent clip based on how they play that given session and how the deal shakes out.

it probably won't, but the fact that it's moving in that direction should be bad enough

At the risk of politarding, as much as I like the idea of free enterprise these payday loan places are so incredibly predatory that they completely **** up poor people with the cycle of debt it creates. It's pretty horrifying.

2-3 years ago a ten year statewide moratorium on interest limits expired. In those ten years payday loan places ran rampant over town, replacing every closed down convenience store and other storefronts. You could tell how dangerous a neighborhood was by how many "check cashing" places were around. The industry spent a ton of money fighting for an extension, their primary argument being how many employees they would have to lay off if the stores couldn't do payday loans anymore (lol, ugh). Thankfully they didn't get their way. The places which survived now mostly tout auto title loans, with interest rates so ridiculously high that I'd rather not know what the dafault/repo rate is. At least people actually have to have a car with a title in their name to qualify so that eliminates a large percentage of the poors.

w/r/t Dudd's comment, just last night we were having a chuckle over how places like Rent-A-Center will sell a $600 TV for like $4000 spread over the life of the loan. But then again this is America and everyone MUST have a huge HDTV even if they can't afford it...

Poker took off after TV/holecam because it was like "Oh, so this is how you play poker".

I always sucked at poker and didn't understand the fundamental concept of the game really. If I played I thought everyone had a monster hand every time and I was super easy to read. I thought rednecks played poker and I thought for small stakes.

I remember that summer when Robert Varkonyi was on ESPN playing poker I kept seeing it and thinking "wtf is poker on TV?" and changed the channel. Then Norm and Lon sounded so into it that I was like "wtf is this?" and started watching. I had never heard of Holdem and didn't understand why they were spreading cards on the table.

Anyway, seeing their cards was like the big bang for me at least. Suddenly it was like "Oh, so this is how you play? I can do this." I realized bluffing wasn't something you just randomly decided to do to prove you were the alpha male or some ****, but was something that was dictated by the game and the situation.

Not that I ever got particularly good at cards but relatively speaking I was worlds better after watching just a little bit on TV.

With blackjack there wasn't really a secret to be unearthed like there was in poker.

is the LVL dramabomb worth reading?

No

thanks - i went work -> sleep -> work over the past 36 hours so i'd be starting from page 1 (caught up on the FAQ thread ldo)

Behold, the Quesarito

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671981/...uper-burrito#1

do want.