Bill is talking about the recent move by Bodog.   That would be totally anonymous play.

A bit of add perspective for you.   Kim Lund was half of the Bobsey twins on a site I first frequented — PokerRoom.  He did what Bill does — plan, interface, promote.

I said:

Having played at Kim’s old home, I understood community. A lot of friends were successful grinders. At the time that translated mostly to 2-4 or 3-6. Yet every day many would meet in the lobby at around 4 p.m. so the Brits and Yanks could get a S&G going to harass the loser for the next 24.

That type of culture was similar to the blogger world I then inhabited. There were regular schedules of private tournaments that were very well attended by people not really looking hard at the ROI. It was better players than most would ever see in a MTT at that level.

The reason people play is not exclusive. I would guess not a few muti-accounters did it to avoid the light and have some fun without comments.

We used to do silly things that made little monetary sense. I remember getting $10 free for not being on a site for a while along with some others I knew. We had a contest to see who could get the most in a month. Try and explain how several serious grinders got caught up in it.

With the info that sites can mine, there are a lot of promotions that make little sense beyond the class of people that it makes sense too. And, sites haven’t figure that out and maintain their shotgun approach.

Hate to steal from another site — even when it is my words.  But it will bring you up to speed on my view.

What has really happened was Black Friday.  Not as we see it but as a site might.   The management at other sites drooled.  All of a sudden, the top two U.S. facing juggernauts were out of the picture.   The idea for the survivors was to make hay while the cloud sun did its thing.

Well, that didn’t just happen and fall into their hands.  Old problems didn’t go away.  Exponential growth affected few. Problems for other seemed to get worse.   Yup, Bodog was sucking hind tit again.

Let me go back.  Kim managed to do more than other manager with bathrobes — honest, I am not making this up — than others could with a five-figure budget.  I am not saying they were perfect.  Their support operation was beyond lousy in an arena where lousy abounds.  But, he did manage to get inside the heads of a lot of players and coax them his way with limited resources expended.

An analog to the S&G’s I described above were little MTT’s called blogger tournaments.  There were a host of them at various levels that never made sense to those outside the loop.  Let me digress.  When that Friday hit, I’d been killing a stupid little Stud8 tournament for months.  Luck did not explain away my killing it.  I’d found a +EV way to succeed.  Well, blogger tournament and those S&Gs mentioned, aren’t +EV.   You have a better/worse shark:fish ratio in them.  Yet, in their heyday they were considered a must by many.  People doing things for ulterior motives isn’t anything new.

In the heyday, every site promoted the WSOP.   PokerStars figured that didn’t fill folks Jones for tournaments.  They weren’t alone but they built on it while other looked at bottom lines and, instead, pulled back.  People are still willing to promote some WSOP seats.  None promote the PokerStars circuit that has given them legs.  Why?  Well that is “the competition” doncha know.  They keep that going even knowing that the WSOP (Harrah) will shortly be all the competition they can handle and more.  Promoting the Euro/Asian/SA circuits might make sense if they bothered to look at their customers.  If a guy wants one of those circuits, why not make it possible instead of sending him to P* to play?

It is simple things like that which are beyond ignored.   Tomorrow we will do what we did today.  Nevermind we are doing it with less in customers, rake and whatever.  It is good enough and what others do.   In doing so they ignore more data than even Amazon garners.  But, Amazon mines the data better.   Amazon figures out what works; Bodog comes up with anonymous tables.  Wow!  WTG, Bodog.

ADDENDUM:

Here is a PokerRoom bathrobe example:

There was a guy in the forum promoting 3-9.  I think his name was Sikillu or such and the hand he called “The Sik”.  Bloggers will easily identify with 2-7 silliness that has abounded — THE HAMMER.   Anyway, Kim set up a promo.  The site tracked hand that played 3-9 and won.  Progress was posted.   In the end,. somebody won a PokerRoom bathrobe.  It generated playing crap hands in ring games.  It added rake.  It got more people playing.  It cost a $20 bathrobe.

Related posts:

1. Poker Post — So many ways
2. Politics and Poker
3. Post Frontier

The story I want to relate came from an office visit.  I had bursitis.  I couldn’t even reach my wallet — no cracks!  He did some manipulation that helped a bit and gave me a scrip.  Said to give a shout or drop by the house if it didn’t get better.   We hit his coffee machine and then he told me something that has stuck with me.  He said that if I’d come with him just out of school there would have been a long needle in my shoulder and supposed state of the art treatment.  Then he said, “I learned less is often more.”  Your problem isn’t serious.  This will probably handle it.  If not, we’ll work on doing more.  That said a lot to me and I’ve held on to it for 35 years or whatever.

I don’t know what his bad bills were but I’d guess above average.  The one office was up scale but the other was quite a bit lower income.  Today, an office manager would get in the act I’d bet.   Another buddy was an EMT and went with him to the hospital once as a pretend doctor — lose your license probably these days.  He was telling me about this skank with fleas hoping off her exposed area.   That makes me think he wasn’t worried about what an office manager might say.

I’m an telling that story because it is all so different from my visit to this local operation.   Billing came first and medicine was an adjunct.  That may sound like a put down.  But, it wouldn’t be that odd for those doctors to be more like Larry than not.

You see the rest of the story shows another progression.  That ER work that he loved? He dropped it.  Even though he still loved it, his premiums as an ER doctor took such a jump he just couldn’t afford to continue with it.   I don’t think he was ever sued.  His staff and patients really like him and the attention he gave.  But, when his wife need attention he left practice and retired early after he had to give up deliveries for the same insurance reasons.  He said he just wasn’t able to give the right care for people that he wanted too.

What is wrong with it all is that it isn’t an environment that all those Larry type can do their thing without doing thing that they know are needed.  Those doctors may have figured out what Larry did about over treating.  But the hospital is on them to send more in for tests and there is the CYA orders too.   And the result is what I was offered, yesterday.   I turned down the blood test ($320 the last time) and when you go in every 90-days to get that scrip, they’re gonna order it again.  I know that was part of the last doctor’s program.

Medical care isn’t broken.  They have tools that would have amazed Larry, 35-years ago.  I imagine the bad doctor ratio these days isn’t any different from then.  What is broken is the business side of it.

They say see your doctor at least once a year.  If you are on Medicare, it is every 90-day — need it or not.

ADDENDUM:

Why do drug companies advertise?  At the end they list the side effects that should terrify one.  Yet people line up for $10 pills that could end up killing them.  With the last doctor, I’d ask for first appointment in the morning.  Usually there were more drug sales people than patients.  Honest, I once counted six banging away on laptops.   They’ve replace medicine with data collection.

Related posts:

1. We know who their Doctor is

It is about the classic gambler’s ruin scenario.  In poker we call that player passive-passive.  I really don’t care much for the effort of understanding this.  You may have a different view.  So, let me share the url:

HOW TO GAMBLE IF YOU’RE IN A HURRY

There are lots of reference to other studies you can use.  The article discusses your goal and bankroll and the optimal method gamble profitably in house favoring scenarios.

Related posts:

1. Let’s Gambool

No related posts.

Nice wheels.  It has a 54 MPeGe rating for the hopefully 32 miles max for the battery.  After the engine kicks in it gets about 20 MPG; or, about what my SUV gets.   Watch the ABC video; it gets worse.  Its being built in Finland and we gave them a half-billion to help create jobs.  I guess the country of production was left out.

 

Related posts:

1. A picture is worth
2. One Word can be as Graphic as a Picture

Hear the cymbals ring
Callin’ one and all
To the martial swing,
Strike up the band

As we’ve heard and the blogs will parrot, FT has been sold.   That seems a fitting spot for us to — if not end — at least put the UIGEA and Colored Days in the rearview for a bit.  It seems a good spot to reflect on the added protection given to us by our government.  Let all be grateful.  Yeah…  Right…

I wonder if the administration et al will get around to telling us how many jobs this creates.

No related posts.

I am sure every reader has had an incident.  With several email accounts, I’d occasional write them with a problem that would set them off on a huge deal.  I would correct it by sending it with the correct email.  Once they established who we were and gave us an incident report.  That did two things.  It identified that we had a valid relationship. It provide a chain that could be used to walk the the process and place the next support person at the right point with the right detail that need filling in.  While security and staff function get very involved in the setup, it is really a cut and dried or cut and paste situation

Comcast completely ignores all this.  I got a couple of incident reports and gave the details to validate them.  But, every individual — including ComcastSteve, who should have know better — required me to repeat all the validation when I was providing them with the incident number.   I thought for a while that it was just some lazy asses sending out a form letter hoping that I’d forget about it or some other drone ended up doing the work.   I am comfortable saying that isn’t true.  It is too pervasive to be individual choice.   The one that doesn’t want to be bothered and hopes you’ll dry up and blow away is the company — Comcast.

How petty can it get?  Well, the problem I had is close to the bottom of the barrel. I overpaid by EFT.  The account information showed the credit.  $500 to Comcast is insignificant.  Given interest rates and the period they could postpone payment makes it even stupider. Their benefit is as close to zero as it gets.  They’ve invested multiple support interactions. Their failure to resolve the issue brought in much higher level personal.  Multiply that across their millions of users is the only way it impacts their bottom line and they seem happy allowing that to happen.

Seems awfully silly doesn’t it.  But, there may be a profitable component.  Those who operate with franchise or license can base increases on their cost of doing business plus a reasonable profit.  Like utilities they go before commissions with cost a factor.   If they are allowed a percentage above their cost then the higher the cost the higher their profits.  Such entities have a disincentive to control cost.

The most egregious recollection I have of such practices was with a local utility.   They hired a CEO who didn’t want to move to the area.   He was accommodated by their renting an expensive home in an exclusive community.  Each weekend they provided a private jet rental to fly him back and forth to his real home.  All this was an expense that over time could actually increase their profits.  And things like this nicely conform to standard accounting practices.

It’d be nice if this only happened with franchised entities having a monopoly.  But, the plethora of laws regulating all business has grown and grown.  The hoops that American companies must jump through keep expanding.  It can take months or years to establish a going concern — especially if there are actual environmental factors.   Those should be operating companies that are taking on new employees.  The laws stay; business suffers; congress throws money away.

When you see things happening that you might gloss over, don’t!  People are being protected out of their job and business is rewarded beyond their worth in the process.   This seems bigger than the entitlement issues because it limits the marketplace.  And the trend is to protect even less inefficient business.  That’s the real advantage international competitors have over our businesses.  More can be made gaming our business but it leaves us with a serious competitive disadvantage.   Jumping through hoops isn’t productive but it can be lucrative to the wrong folks.

All this from my $550 mistake.  Sorry.

No related posts.

After posting all that stuff on DSLReports, I got the following response:

I’d already provided that info to their database when I signed up.  I provided it to the person who gave me the reference number I used in the title to the post.  I’d also given it to every Comcast employee along the way.  You don’t need to be a time study expert to realize that such inefficiency multiplied so many times impacts cost in a serious way with the millions of interactions that take place.

You may be wondering just why ComcastSteve needed my phone number with our conversation being over the Internet. Maybe not.  I discounted it at the time.  But ComcastSteve is a sneaky devil — or Comcast without Steve is.   I’m guessing the latter.   Why? besides my having info you don’t have yet. Everybody wanting that same info probably wasn’t for including in their Facebook friends page. In ComcastSteve land, it seemed normal.  Stop and think horror movie.

OK, here is where the scary music start to play and you know there a crescendo where you jerk in your movie seat.  My electronic interaction via DSLReports with good old ComcastSteve branched to a new path.  My cell phone rang and it was a guy who didn’t say he was Steve but did say he was Comcast, “Mr. Prevo, this is Comcast. I wanted to let you know that you should have your refund in five to seven days.”  Me: “Thanks”  Him: “Glad we could be of service.”  Me: “Bye.”  That call lasted about 10-seconds or so.

You see the nefarious component don’t you?  Nothing in writing.   Customer service?  [Insert laugh track; roll credits]

ADDENDUM:

I see why Comcast needs to charge whorehouse prices. It is a poorly run company.  It can be because of the local monopolies it enjoys.  You can be abusive, stupid, and inefficient when you are the only game in town.  It doesn’t take a Harvard case study to validate this premise.  Comcast broadcasts it in their every action.

When DSL was the only broadband around, the government required it to open its lines to competition.  Verizon was the local carrier but I used Earthlink.  The telcos have crippled it a bit but it is still possible.  Government never gave us that opportunity with cable.  Do you wonder why?  Silly Goose.  Take a look at their political contributions.

Related posts:

1. Resolved
2. I am from _________

I won’t go into what exactly I think happened.  The result was a stupid situation brought on by never getting a Comcast bill that was the same amount.  I may/probably switched $55.96 to $550 and two days later paid $55.96.   There may be something to this beyond my stupidity.  And, I’ll shortly be back on the support merry-go-round over the amounts.

So, I wanted my $550 back.  I went to their chat and the tech transferred me and then the new person said they had to talk to me and would call in the next day or so.  That didn’t happen and the next week I’m back to chat and it worked out well — or so it seemed. (Text will be in the ADDENDUM:)  The refund was promised.  Hurrah!

Then this fellow over Mumbai way sent me an email:

Dear Mr. Prevo,
Good Day!
This is in connection to the ticket we received regarding the refund
request where you would like the $500.00 credit on your account to be
refunded back to yourbank account. I do apologize for the inconvenience
this issue has caused you.
Please be informed that in order for the refund to be processed, there
is a need for you to fax  the front and back copy of your check within
48 hours from the receipt of this notice. Our Billing Department's Fax
Number is 847-391-8754. Kindly include this reference number: 002802808
on the fax you are sending.
Once the needed documentation is faxed withint 48 hours from the receipt
of this notice, the estimated resolve date of this issue will be on
Tuesday, August 2, 2011.
Should we be of further assistance, please call at 1-800-934-6489. You
can also chat with one of our online representatives at
http://www.comcastsupport.com/chat
Thank you for choosing Comcast.
Sincerely,
Rudelyn B
Comcast Customer Care Specialist
**************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee
only and may vary from other responses depending on geography,
promotional campaigns or other factors.  If you are not the intended
recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized
use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is
prohibited.
**************************************************

What is the problem here?  Well, there was no check it was an EFT from the ACH.  The thing to take away from the letter collection is there is no check or check number.  The fellow in Mumbai was demanding something that never existed.   To add silliness, who has a fax machine these days?  It been a good 10 years here.

So, I went to DSLreports.com.  That was the place I trashed Frontier and got a comment here from ComcastMark.  He gave me an email address that’d take care of me and they did without hassle and it all ended with me a happy camper thanks to Edith O.

What could Comcast learn here?  That they Mumbai operation isn’t a cost saving and it alienates customers.  I went through 2 sessions with them and that carries a cost.  It was further handled by a third individual that screwed it up.   So, a more costly support person at DSLReports — ComcastSteve — had to resolve it.  Their procedures and limits on support personnel didn’t resolve the problem.  Their training is poor or their policies are.  That isn’t cost effective or a good path to retention.

You should note that no support person approached the issue in the standardized manner you would assume was a function of level one support. It is Comcast roulette.

OK, that’s the news.  Now to get my blood pressure back to what passes for normal.

P.S. If you have Comcast and an issue, bypass level one help and go to dslreports.com or use the email address ComcastMark gave me We_can_helpATcable.comcast.com.   And, yes, I should have done that from the start.  Thanks for pointing that out.

ADDENDUM: xxxx substituted for some data

analyst Edraly has entered room

EdralyBBBL: Hello James, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Edraly. Please give me one moment to review your information.

James: My Issue: I was supposed to be contacted on Monday about a refund on a $550 overpayment. This did not occur.

EdralyBBBL: Thank you for contacting Comcast Chat Support. It is my pleasure to have you on this chat.

EdralyBBBL: James, I understand that your inquiry is on the $550.00 overpayment on the account, correct?

James: yes

EdralyBBBL: Okay, I see. We understand that James.

EdralyBBBL: No worries, I will be more that glad to help you with your inquiries today, James. Let me pull up your account here.

EdralyBBBL: Thank you for providing your account information. Would you please verify the information I received is correct. First name James Last name Prevo Phone Number 219763xxxx Street Address xxxx Plaza AV Zip Code xxxxx

James: yes

EdralyBBBL: Great. Comcast takes your security & privacy very seriously. May you please provide the last four of your SSN?

James: 8763

EdralyBBBL: Wonderful! Thank you for the information, James. Please give me 2-3 minutes to pull up and review your account.

James: ok

EdralyBBBL: While waiting, let me share with you one of our FREE services. Comcast CustomerCentral. It is one place for customers to pay your bill, manage your account settings, and get help and support for all Comcast products. You can easily access Comcast CustomerCentral from this link: http://customer.comcast.com

EdralyBBBL: Thank you for waiting, James. I have checked on your account here.

EdralyBBBL: Balance on the account is -$516.35

EdralyBBBL: The credit was applied to the account.

James: i am retired and this dragging out is not appreciated. I would like $500 refunded.

EdralyBBBL: It is applied to the account as a credit James.

James: refund the credit!!!!

James: it will take 2 years to recover your way

EdralyBBBL: However, I am submitting a ticket for you so for the amount to be credited back to your bank.

EdralyBBBL: I am still typing James. I would appreciate your patience to wait, thanks.

James: thank you. when and how will this be confirmed

EdralyBBBL: May I have your best contact number and email address please?

James: 219-763-xxxx kenprevoATgmail.com

EdralyBBBL: The ticket is checked within 48 to 72 business hours (9days). You will be contacted through phone or email once resolved.

EdralyBBBL: Thank you, James !

EdralyBBBL: Stay online, please!

James: that is what you said last week. that’s more than 6-9 days.

EdralyBBBL: Our goal is to provide you with a consistently superior customer experience – that’s our guarantee. Learn more about the Comcast Customer Guarantee at http://www.comcast.com/corporate/Customers/CustomerGuarantee.html?fss=customer%20guarantee

EdralyBBBL: Submitting the ticket right now. Stay online please. Thank you!

EdralyBBBL: Done here. Reference number is 110722-000137.

James: THANK YOU!

EdralyBBBL: You may take note of this number, James

EdralyBBBL: Sure dear. You are welcome!

EdralyBBBL: Before we finish up I’d like to just take a minute to review what we have done for you today: we submitted a ticket for the money to be refunded back to your bank. I am happy you have contacted Comcast today. Will there be anything else that I may assist you with?

James: NO THANK YOU

Related posts:

1. The Times
2. Yesterday
3. Comcast Resolved?

Many of you have a Blogger site.  On it you put your Avatar (picture or graphic) that represent who you are or wish to be seen as.  Here’s what such a comment looks like:
Lucki Duck said…Nice! Congratulations MOJO!

That comment here would have a square of random graphics that often looks like a quilt square.   Your handsome face or clever graphic didn’t travel well.   Gravatar lets you carry you avatar around the Internet to most blog and forum software.  To post on a site you enter an email address.  That is what links your avatar to that software.  Now, almost everywhere you post or comment, the avatar is automatically there.

The easy way to do it is to enter a comment to this post. You’ll see that random graphic next to it. Click on it. That will take you to the site and walk you through the setup. It is easy to do. Now, your bright, smiling face will appear in my comments and in forums and such.  If they click on the avatar, it provides the full size picture.

You upload your picture/graphic.  You give them the email addresses you wish to associate with that avatar.  They will send an email to that account for verification.  A few minutes later you are all done.  At that point any comment you’d previously made here or any Gravatar recognizing sites will show that avatar.  Come back to the comment you entered here and it should be your avatar instead of that random graphic.

Easy Peasy.

No related posts.