It isn't over till I say it's over

"If you’re going to call on the river, you might as well raise on the turn—this is a fundamental concept in pot-limit and no-limit poker."
--Lyle Berman, "Super System 2"

OK, so online poker as we know it is going down the tubes. What's next?

I've been trying to look for the silver lining in this mess the U.S. government has gotten us into, and there are a few positives.

One short-term outcome is that many players' money is temporarily stuck in their respective sites while they try to find new withdrawal methods. This means that a lot of their money is in play right now, in the few weeks before the games go to crap.

I've seen plenty of bad players burning through their cash the last couple of days. After all, what's a gambler who can't withdraw his money going to do? He's going to play with it. And I'm going to concentrate over the next few weeks of grabbing as much of that dead money as I can.

Another plus is that it seems like many players have this feeling that playing poker is pointless because it may all be over soon. I felt this way for a little while too, but now I think this mind-set can lead to sloppy play. I hope to target some opponents who have given up hope.

In the long run, it's possible that these hurdles to online poker will turn out for the best: that only after going through these hard times will people seriously work to pass a poker exemption into law, and that could lead to a second boom. I admit it seems unlikely that poker will get an exemption to the UIGEA anytime soon, but can you imagine how great the games would be if that did happen?

These obstacles are also a chance to diversify your games. If you only know hold 'em, you really need to branch out to other brands of poker that may not dry up as quickly. I'm trying to learn pot limit Omaha and triple draw, in part because there aren't too many good players in these games. I've found them to be profitable so far.

Finally, while I know it's wishful thinking to believe a new Neteller-type payment processor will suddenly rise up, there are still possibilities for new deposit methods to emerge. I don't know what will become the dominant way to get money in and out of poker sites, but there are a few options being discussed on blogs and forums -- things like phone card deposits, paper checks through the mail, USPPInc or offshore banks backed by the poker sites themselves. None appear promising, but we'll see.

Don't despair! Even if everything does suck, now is the time for constructive ideas. If nothing else, play poker now while you still can. Who knows what might come next. We may soon hear that PokerStars or Full Tilt are pulling out of the U.S. as well.

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I posted a little while ago about the Dogwatch Handgrabber, which allows you to datamine and display Bodog stats with Pokertracker. This program is awesome, but I found it to be a little bit buggy. Almost every time, it eventually caused my Bodog client to crash, forcing me to miss hands while I reloaded the software.

Fortunately, a work-in-progress solution was found a few weeks ago. Apparently, the crashes only occurred on dual processor computer systems because of some kind of hyperthreading error. The fix to this problem is to tell Dogwatch through Task Manager to only use one of your system's two processors. Here's the forum post with more detailed information and instructions.