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The “City Hideout”

Over in the UK, a poker site named PartyGaming is about to go public. No big shock there — except that if the company hits its expected first-day price, it will instantly be worth $10 billion, slightly less than Marks and Spencer, and more than British Airways and EMI put together. Why? Because in the last three years, its pretax profits have risen from from $5.8 million to $372 million, and it’s currently pulling in about $58,000 an hour. The business plan is simple: It lets people play poker together online, and shaves a tiny 1% off of each pot.
The company was founded by a woman who’d made her fortune in online porn, who hired a 25-year-old kid fresh out of an Indian comp-sci program to write her software. That’s surreal enough, but my favorite detail about the company, as reported in The Guardian, is this:
PartyGaming’s head office is in Gibraltar; its computer servers run from there and from Kahnawake, a Mohawk Indian reserve within Canada; its marketing office is in London but most of its 1,000 staff work in a call centre and software development site in Hyderabad, southern India.
Man alive. Porn, call-service-centers, Canadian Indian reserves — it’s like the wireframe model for a sci-fi novel cowritten by Cory Doctorow and Thomas Friedman.
As an unrelated aside, I wonder whether the rise of poker is a permanent new fixture in global culture, or a short-term bubble. I don’t actually play poker, and I don’t find it interesting to watch. But ludologically, I’m fascinated by the ascendance of games in today’s pop culture — a category that, judging by the popularity of poker, goes quite beyond videogames, and now includes competitive reality TV. Skill-based games have always been huge, of course; pro sports have been around for centuries. But the skills celebrated in today’s newly rising games aren’t about physical achievement so much as more about cunning, bluffing, and Victorian subterfuge — it’s like a world gladiatorial culture designed by Jane Austen.
(Thanks to F!LTER magazine for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
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