yeoz's internet gambling addiction
About a month ago, I became addicted to a small little Internet diversion called gpokr.
I had introduced a coworker of mine, who was a big friend of Dice Wars, to a silly Internet diversion called kdice. Dice Wars, if you haven't played it, is sorta like the board game 'Risk', but, with dice representing abstract combat units, instead of infantry or soldiers or what not. Dice Wars was a fun little game, but, being single player versus computer opponents, it was limited by the (weak?) AI that it had, and, would thus get fairly repetitive and tiresome quickly. So, when I told my coworker about, kdice, a online multi-player clone of dice wars, he jumped at the opportunity to play against other people. We played a couple games of kdice together, (with me jumping through hoops just to play, using a web proxy to get past kdice's IP blocking, since, we were both playing from behind the same IP at work). Of course, he was much better (or much luckier) then I was, and he would often still be in the game long after I was taken out.
So, during the downtime, after getting horribly crushed in kdice, I started playing another game that was also hosted on the same site that kdice was running on. It was an online texas hold'em poker game called gpokr. I didn't have much luck at first, but, it was fun, and the thing that kept me going back was the friendly idle banter during hands, the kind I hadn't experienced in any game since gameneverending. gpokr even had it's own little miss cult of personality too. Anyway, in the last week of December, with a little hard work, and a lot of luck, I managed to get myself into the top 100, and earned myself a shiny little trophy. And, that's when it all went downhill.
At the end of each month, a trophy is given out to everyone in the top 100, and everyone is reset back to 0. So, at the beginning of the month of January, after the reset, I spent a few hours a day chasing a spot in the leader board. But, for me, the month was up and down, (mostly down), and I kept spending more and more time playing. I had made it a couple times to just barely past 100, but, would regularly lose it all shortly after. Near the end the month, I would spend practically every waking moment on gpokr, including this entire previous weekend (even skipping out on a friend's surprise birthday party) playing gpokr. Although, this weekend, I did manage to get myself into the top 50. I was pretty happy with myself. Of course, today, like clockwork, I lost everything, in a couple of hours of really bad betting, while on tilt. An entire weekend of work down the drawn. G-ddamnit.
Anyway, K., et al., that's why I've been behind on so many things. I don't know if I'll be able to stop entirely, but, I'll at least start limiting the amount of time I spend on there. Although, I still don't consider it wasted time, since, I met a couple of people on gpokr, that I now consider to be friends, (including notably, f.).
Bonus: I learned about most of the above games via MeFi. Links follow in chronological order:
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