PocketFives.com: A Sanctuary For Idiocy

I’ll admit it: I secretly hoped that when all of the online poker rooms were closing their cyber doors to the USA that Stars, UB and FTP would follow suit. My first reason was selfish: I wanted to be forced to spend my extra time on other endeavors of which I’m quite fond, such as music and writing. But I’m addicted to online poker and I find myself growing fonder of it all the time. I hope that Stars and company continue to battle it out with Uncle Sammy.

My second reason was nobler: I wanted the PocketFivers of the world (at http://www.pocketfives.com/) to grow up and learn basic skills, such as spelling and how not to be such complete idiotic assholes. I won’t paint the site with one broad stroke of the brush, but the site is largely composed of posters who are very young, many of whom I suspect are under 18-years of age, and whose moral compasses are way out of whack. Maybe if all of the sites had gone down these young people would have been able to somehow reorient themselves.

They have their own vernacular. It’s bad enough that the English language has been dumbed down enough as it is to satisfy the semiliterate of this country, but these kids can’t get through a sentence without completely butchering the language. That can be forgiven, though, as I have worked with PhD’s in the past who suffered from the same disease. What is worse is their overuse of slang and shorthand to express themselves.

In the online poker age we have kids now that instead of going to college and getting their degrees are dropping out of college and taking poker up as a “profession.” My props to young guns like GBMantis and ActionJeff – they’ve done well for themselves in their online endeavors. But most of the rest of the lot are turning into bums that don’t know how to spell words like “obvious” (obv) and are unable to express their joy at winning a poker hand without really making asses of themselves by typing “shhhhhhhhhhhhhippppppit!” If you come back at them with an intelligent witticism, they form a posse and shower you with puerile invective that makes your average stable boy sound like a Rhodes Scholar.

In all seriousness, what is most troubling about these youths is that some of their heroes are online poker cheats. You all know who I am talking about. All an online poker cheat has to do is post on PocketFives that he is sorry for what he has done, and all is forgiven. The PocketFives faithful fall just short of mounting petition drives to reinstate the offender’s account on whatever site they were banned from. Just post a heartfelt mea culpa, and everything’s cool, baby! Reply to a thread that you think such acts require consequences and then you’ll be peppered with hateful and obnoxious prose that would make Andrew Dice Clay blush. And after the dust has settled the kiddies keep their accounts and you get banned from the forum.

This culture of arrogance and amoralism is certainly not confined to PocketFives, but it is definitely the site on the Web to see where it is truly being nurtured and bred.

Oh yeah, they have some great poker articles too…

Elvis F. Henry