I GET PAID TO DISCOURAGE PEOPLE FROM PLAYING POKER ONLINE

Hi all.

Up until recently i was employed by one of the smaller poker sites to discourage people from playing on any of the major sites by trying to convince others that online poker is rigged. This is my confession.

My name is Harold and up until last week i was in the employ of a marketing company that was hired to use shilling tactics to get people to move from the major poker sites. To do this we had a four week intensive training course on how to use some of the major social networking sites including twitter, facebook, etc. After our training was completed we were given a list of sites to visit. We set up multiple accounts on these sites and started our “work”

The good thing about my job was the fact that i could work from home to make money. As i had been unemployed for so long this really appealed to me as i could work my own hours. We got payed a flat rate of $3 per hour and then a commission of .20 cents per post This may not sound like much but when you are posting on average 250 times a day it’s quite easy to make $50 a day on top of the $24 that you get paid basic rate.

At first it was hard to do as i had very little knowledge of poker as i have never been interested in playing but as the days and weeks went by i found i was getting into the lingo easier and knowing that i could just copy and paste many of my answers. This little trick helped me to up my post count considerably. After 3 months i got a promotion to supervisor. This meant i had to go into the office 3 days a week and help train new people about how to post.

The main dirty trick we used was to go to chat forums and such like and pretend that we had evidence that X poker site was rigged against players. We always accused the major sites like stars or fulltilt as they had the biggest player pool and our client wanted to get some of this action. We used to post fake hand histories claiming that we were always losing and also made outlandish claims about the software/random card generator/owners and staff.

More often than not we would engage with other users in the threads who would always claim the sites were not rigged. These guys were our biggest worry because no matter what we said we never actually had any hard evidence to back up our claims of rigged deals or hand manipulation. The tactic we used against these guys was to drown them out with what we termed “white noise”. If someone tried to discredit us then a few of us would go to that chat forum and try to drown out the posters with a ruthless barrage of posts that meant nothing but covered up what they were posting. There were days when i posted in the same forum thread on 7 or 8 different accounts.

Another tactic we used was to find posts from other people. There are a lot of people online who have posted blogs and reports saying poker is rigged and we used these to our advantage by posting links to them to back up our claims of rigging. As i said we were getting paid to do this so we made sure that we only targeted the main sites that had the majority of players and then subtly nudge people in the direction of a site we “believed” to be legitimate and trustworthy. The site we promoted was of course the one that was paying our wages.

After doing this job for nearly a year i  have finally moved on to a better paying full time position in a well known well established company. No more logging in at all hours to try get my post count up to pay the bills and even better no more arguing with people on the forums trying to prove something that does not exist. This used to totally drain me and i feel it affected my health somewhat to an extent that it made me quite ill. I have decided to make this post to let people know that this kind of tactic goes on. I only worked on the poker side of this but i also talked to guys who worked in other departments that were paid to discredit many other types of things.

This is my confession,

Please feel free to reply to me and i will try to answer your questions.