Well, in the land of mahjong and sicbo, try brining in a game immortalized by Doyle and Maverick. Poker is as less heard of and played in Asia as American football. Each Asian country prides itself in a favorite card or skill game. So in Japan the current rage is pachinko, in India there is teen patti (a variant of 3 card poker) and rummy, in China there is mahjong and in Korea there is Badugi or Baduki as some folks prefer to call it. Each game or skill game has its own variation and flavor. An average Asian – particularly Chinese – is said to gamble 27 times more on an average than his American or European counterpart; whether this is myth or fact can be actually seen on the tables in Macau. Like in the little gambling dens of Macau and everywhere else in Asia, these games rule and poker – the cache of the western world – takes a backseat.

Asia has always been unofficially the largest gaming market in the world. The amounts that are bet in small parlors or cyber cafes (called pc café’s here) are staggering to say the least. We’re talking about over a 100 billion dollar industry in Korea itself, for instance, where foremost are games like matgo, 7 card stud and badugi.

Badugi (also referred to as Asian Poker) is a variant of poker that has been gaining popularity among the card-playing enthusiasts in the past few years. It has been usually reported to have come from Korea but there are also accounts of its Chinese origin. In Badugi, players receive four down cards (hole cards), after which there is a round of betting. There will be a total of three drawing round in which there will be a round of betting after each one. Where player's discard to improve their hands. The object is simple, make the smallest hand by having a hand with every different suite and no pairs. The best possible hand being A-2-3-4 having one club, diamond, heart and spade. The blind structure of Badugi is quite similar to that of other poker games, with the two players to the left of the dealer paying the small and the big blind respectively.

At the beginning of the game, four cards are dealt to each player from the player sitting to the left of the Big Blind and the game continues in a clockwise motion. There are four betting rounds where the players can keep their cards or discard any number of cards in their hand if they are not confident of the cards that they hold, to be dealt new cards. The options are as other poker games too: to check, call, bet, raise or fold. After the fourth betting round, you have a final draw. This allows the final betting round as a prelude to the showdown. Remember, this is a low ball game and a rainbow A-2-3-4 is the best hand to win, this is the “lowest Badugi”.

In general, drawing on the last round against an opponent who has not drawn is considered a mistake, unless special circumstances warrant this maneuver. Similar to other poker games, position can be an important component in Badugi strategy. Players who are last to act often have an opportunity to bluff since they are able to observe the actions of other players before they act. In addition, players in late position are able to determine the strength of their hand more accurately by observing the actions of other players. Another aspect of the strategy of Badugi involves the number of people at the table. The more people there are at the table, the more likely there is to be a 4 card Badugi. Bluffing with a 2 or 3 card hand is not usually advisable when playing at a 5-player table. However, when you are playing with fewer than 4 people, a 3-card hand can often win with a good bluff.

With enough practice, you can get the hang of it quicker than a years-old badugi pro.

No one page can hope to give a thorough lesson in Internet Gaming Slang, abbreviations and acronyms, and though initially bewildering it has been a fun experience over the years. Especially with gaming slang added to the regular lol’s and lmao’s, it has become a truly enlightening experience. The motive must have been to create and popularize these ROFLs and WTFs for their time/letter-saving qualities, but as with all jargon, they are also useful to convey a lengthy concept in a quick word – if you can call it that. LOL. There you go.

So my first introduction was to LOL: as it turned out it was a simple laugh out loud to convey to the person I was chatting with that I was indeed chuckling away to glory. Sometimes, as I found out, a LOL expressed it better than the emoticon created in the chat box for the same purpose. As I also found out that netizens and gamers have a tendency to overstate their feelings – one of the reasons obviously being that the folks they’re communicating with are not visually with them.

And thus we have the OMG - "Oh My Goodness!" or "Oh My Gosh!" or "Oh My God!" for those times when you would like to express your extreme happiness, shock, alarm, or a similar emotion; like that instant when you get quads playing online poker or someone smacks a royal flush right in front of you. Or we have the STFU - "shut the %#&@ up." Much like WTF, it's not really considered a swear word, at least not to the level it would be if you actually typed out the full words. Nice people never use this phrase fully.

Let’s be done with the rudimentary introductions. Here we go:
POS: Piece of Shit
LOL: Laugh Out Loud
LMAO: Laughing My Ass off
LMFAO: Laughing My F&%#ing Ass off  or ("Laughing my fat ass off"); LMTAO ("Laughing my thin ass off") – well, the distinction depends on your self-image!
ROTF: Rolling on the Floor (often ROTFLMFAO)
ROFLMAO – Here, you are "rolling on the floor laughing my ass off". This is when I am absolutely overcome with laughter after I’ve probably heard the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time by collapsing into helpless laughter. This happens in RL (“real life”), where I actually am laughing out loud, maybe for minutes on end. Happens. Often!
BF: Boyfriend
GF: Girlfriend

And moving on further to:
NP – “no problem”
ATM - "at the moment"
BRB - "be right back"
BTW - "by the way"
OTW - "on the way"

Other courtesies when coming or going, or in general chit chat include:
TTYL - "talk to you later
TYT - "take your time
NVM - "never mind"
TY - "thank you"
YW – “you’re welcome”
WB - "welcome back"
TYVM - "thank you very much"
BBS – “be back soon”
BBL - "be back later"
JK – “just kidding”

There are the other ones, but imagine the time and effort they save:
IMHO: In My Humble Opinion (sometimes, the H can be “honest” as well)
BBIAB: Be Back in a Bit
AFAIK: As Far As I Know
IIRC: If I Recall Correctly
IAMF - It's all my fault. Yes, it is. You screwed up. Admit it, apologize and move on.

The ones with a difference, referred to as borderline AOLese:
b/c: Because
k: Okay
TA: Thanks a lot
Gr8: Great
L8R: Later
ne1: Anyone
sux: sucks
rox: rocks
thx: thanks

We also have hacker slang such as, which really is not a shortened version and doesn’t really save time, but then hackers live in their own fantastic world and rarely care to bother about reality:
suxorz: sucks
fuxed: f@%&ed
Noob: newbie
Kewl: Cool
tr00: True
w00t: "woot".  An all purpose happy sound effect.
j00: You
skillz: skills
roxor: rocks, as in "that rocks!" but even more so
ph34r: fear (also ph33r)

Take the example of the overly used PWN or PWNED - Gamer defeats gamer, types in 'I pwn you' rather than I OWN you. Used, misused and abused ad nauseam the world over and over again.

So when I see WOOT or GRATZ I no longer wonder what it could be or google it. I try to figure it out in my own mind! Nor do I flinch anymore when my “MBA” colleagues send in a mail saying: PFA (please find attached) the SLAs (service line agreements) and the SOPs (standard operating procedures) requested EOD (end of the day).

Online gamers and netizens have their own way of communicating invented specifically to shorten the length of communication and to get across quickly. The wonderful part is: it works and is fun, too.

No, I’m not referring to a new shooting angle with my webcam here; nor am I talking about shooting at the nearest shooting range; nor about pool playing angles; I am talking about that set of actions undertaken by clever cheats which occupy a strange gray area in the game of poker.

Angle shooting is engaging in actions that may technically be within the scope of the rules of the game, but that are considered unethical or unfair to exploit or take advantage of another player. For example, an angle shooter might motion as if he were folding his hand to induce other players to fold theirs out of turn.

Like the time when I was playing this online poker tourney where there were these two players who were taking 20-30 seconds every time it was their turn to play. They did it every single time as if they were in cahoots. One of them was continuously chatting in some foreign language and the other was constantly aiming abuse at the pot-winning participant, including me. Is the slow playing taking it away from me, I wondered….I figured the only advantage he was getting was by aggravating and angering everyone on the table and put a couple of them on tilt even.

Look at another setting: Arin, my friend, was at a showdown and this guy deliberately miscalls his hand – probably with the intention of influencing Arin who may have had a better hand, to muck! I mean, Arin had top pair, and Mr. Miscaller very likely had a lower pair, but he declares on the chat, “I have the straight”
Arin folds in anger and frustration. The whole table realized that Mr. Miscaller was lying but it was no use – Arin had folded a winner, the angle shooter guy took the nice big pot!

Yet another form of angle shooting which is pretty exclusive to online poker is to abuse the disconnect protection (DP) rules most internet poker sites have in place. Disconnect Protection is a rule exclusive to online poker rooms whereby if a player is disconnected from the site in the middle of the hand his hand is played out as if he were all-in without the player actually having to put any more money in the pot. The online poker rooms that offer DP usually have specific tables set aside for this so that all players at the table are aware that the special DP rules will apply. How this is used by angle shooters is if a player is in a hand that he is unsure if he has the best cards and doesn't want to invest any more money to find out. He can unplug his internet connection and then wait for the hand to play itself out. On a DP table the remaining cards in the hand would be dealt and the pot would be awarded to the player with the best cards. If there were multiple opponents in the hand then he would be eligible for a side pot, of course!

Angle shooting is done to manipulate your opponents and gain an unfair edge in the game. And they are mostly lacking in evidence since the intention can never be proved and the defaulter can get away with it pretending or claiming that it was a legit error. Make sure that you observe and mark the pattern of such angle shooters clearly. You will find that inadvertently they will repeat their tactics and then you have them. File a complaint with the online poker site that you are playing on, or stay away from these compulsive cheaters.

There is no stopping the cheater who wants to have a go at his techniques – he will constantly re-invent himself and try staying a step ahead of normal honest players.

Like the old poker story goes: "Stop cheating!" the dealer told the card player. "I'm not!" claimed the player. "You must be," said the dealer. "That is not the hand that I dealt you."

I'm not the type of person who gets embarrassed easily. I don't stutter, I don't blush. I just game, and I take gaming seriously. I'm not embarrassed to be a gamer at all. Never have been, and never will be. But like every gamer I have stories of that went down that made me feel like a complete jackass for supporting this hobby of ours. It's all just a big game, and in any game there's a blooper reel.

I remember this occasion when I played in Macau. I played almost every night and all night thru to next morning. I must have busted a month’s salary at least, probably more, I was afraid to count. All the while, I expected something to be comped off from my hotel tab. Imagine my surprise when I was presented with the bill and there was not a single dollar comped off! Not a single dollar. I was like: How the hell does this happen to me!

I demanded to see the duty manager who in turn put me on to my casino host, and she came cantering around to where I was raising a little storm, but to no avail. NOTHING moves in Macau like it does in Vegas and I had gotten a measly 60 points as reward for 6 nights of playing, lol. I was so embarrassed that I vowed I would never go and stay back in MGM again ever. My friends who have visited Macau have similar stories to tell from other places they have stayed in as well.

No matter how much you play, it is funny that in Macau they don’t comp you off like they do in Vegas – which is a fact not well known unless you’ve played at both places.

Reality sucks sometimes.

Imagine a game outside the game - The Metagame!

It’s a concept that exists for all competitive games, and can hardly be defined in one sentence. For the sake of simplicity, the Metagame is a collection of strategies in common use pertaining to HOW everyone ELSE is playing.

Clearly every game requires some quantity of real-world time, but there is a great difference between, for instance, chess and The World of Warcraft. In chess, total skill will win a game. That game skill was developed through real time investment (real time -à game skill), but the skill is independent of the game. You don't have to play ChessZone for 100s of hours to be good at ChessZone. You just have to play chess.

So what is a Metagame? It can be defined as "the SUM of everything that you know about the other players, and everything they know about you." Applied to poker, when you are metagaming, the objective is to look beyond individual hands and attend to the overall structural features of the game involving such concepts as table image, table presence and how they change over time. Something that doesn’t hit your brain the very first few rounds of trying to understand the concept!

Look at it this way, to make it simpler: the cards, positions and your opponents are but parts of a single situation. When you play the "meta" game part of poker, for instance, you are also trying to do things that will have an impact on the larger framework.

A heady combination of psychology and statistics are involved in the metagame behind Poker, especially in the popular poker variation of Texas Hold 'Em. In the film Casino Royale for instance, is shown a lot of the strategy of reading your opponents and playing statistics; and playing your opponent based on your knowledge that they too know the psychology and the statistics. The metagame behind poker is interesting indeed and a great concept to learn and master – you’ll virtually become unassailable!

Practically speaking, you can “establish a table image” by playing with a style that will reflect your personality and your risk approach. Remember that while you are doing this, your smart opponents will begin reacting to you thus minimizing whatever advantages you had established. How do you act to this? You should ADJUST!  If you’ve been aggressive, loosen up a bit. If you’ve been bluffing in between, now cut back and play only solid hands. Balance your play. Make sure you pay attention to the simple features of the game as to how a game changes over sessions, timings and venues. Your image will be established over a period of time and you have to make certain that it is riddled with question marks, a mystery figure not entirely decipherable!

Learning the metagame of poker can be a turning point for your internet poker play in several ways. Young, aggressive, online-trained players can make themselves known in live games around the world within months. As a case study, note this: the metagame of poker has actually now completely shifted focus and all players, both live and online, are today dealing with an extremely high level of belligerence and aggression.

The best thing we, as players, can do now is stay ahead of the information curve. If you were an information seeker before, seek more information now. If you have not been an avid reader, now is a good time to begin. Learn more, each passing day, if winning is the motive.

Get going on mission: Metagaming. It’s a given that a man with money is no match against a man on a mission. So there!