The Planet of the Apes Meets Online Poker
Surely at one time or another everyone has witnessed a group of bourgeois canines playing anthropomorphic poker on one or the other of Cassius Coolidge’s series of paintings. But the man’s whimsical imagination wasn’t quite as far removed from reality as one might like to think. Perhaps you believe that chips and chimps do not go well together and that it sounds like something out of a Douglas Adams book, but if you ever played online against someone who had a great-ape photo for his icon, don’t be so sure it was just the excellent players irritating sense of online humor - you just may have lost a few thousand or more to an actual primate. If you thought using a stick to crack a walnut or a skull was the best an ape could do, in this early twenty-first century, when the world is on the verge of a Technological Singularity (think what an “intelligence explosion” can do to PC and online games), you, man or woman, had better think again.
Primate Programming Inc has found that great apes (who share 97% of DNA with us) are competent IT specialists and are employed by PPI. They enter a training program and upon graduation perform their services with PPI’s clients while demanding very low wages. Somewhere down the line, it was discovered that these employees also can be taught to play poker showing a particular knack for no-limit Texas Hold’em.
These card-playing apes are drawn to no-limit poker due to their natural bent for playful displays of aggression. So, this particular feature enables them to be particularly proficient at aggressive bluffing. In no-limit games, any player can bet his entire wad at any time, a strategy (?) requiring risky, aggressive behavior and the ability to retain a poker face while bluffing.
Since online poker games are anonymous, this helps our poker playing primates. You cannot determine who is of the human persuasion versus the ape persuasion. The human types have actually lost thousands of dollars to a player who played the early rounds with betting very little money and showed lame cards on a regular basis then out of the blue bet big time, of course, everyone in the game called, and the big time better revealed aces. Our winner was undoubtedly jumping up and down and pounding his chest in glee.
Not coincidentally, the primate-payers were initially hired as computer programmers. They actually develop programs by themselves as a side line to playing poker. PPI has not yet revealed the content of these programs. Certainly, though, they could go for a career in professional online-poker playing. They don’t seem to want to pursue this career choice, however. When they leave the office, they are very apt to neglect all their training and go back to climbing fences and eating bananas. Even so, if they are paid regularly, given three squares a day and a boyfriend or girlfriend, David Sklansky and Ed Miller may have to update their No-limit Hold’em instruction books very soon.
For the past several years, Norm McAuliffe, a Yale biology Phd and the scientist heading the research team behind the discovery of programmer apes, has been investing money and effort into a Primate Poker Inc, “hiring” profitable ape-players to play for money in rotating shifts, 24 hours a day. He has been quoted as saying: “I’m completely committed to this business model. It is reasonable to say I am “all in”.”
To read more poker articles like this one go to The Poker Source or Big Poker Blog
Tags: animals, Gambling, games, monkeys, Online Poker, Poker, primates, recreation
