Flip You For It – Part 1
Howard Lindeman was sat in his enormous and luxurious office and from behind his humongous desk he was happily observing a bank of oversized wall mounted flat screen monitors which are at the present moment displaying the millions of blinking and flashing pixels that represent the high stakes cash tables of his website and the obscene amount of action currently being played out across them. As the games unfold before him Lindeman is a man completely content with the world, a master of creation if you will, as he watches his master plan being playing out across the cyber felt.
Suddenly Lindeman’s look of total contentment disappears as the screens he is watching start to stall and lag, he mutters aloud “I’ll have to call those idiots in Tech, see what they can do” inwardly though he knows there won’t be anything they can do without upgrading the hardware, after all there where thousands upon thousands of poker fans across the globe soaking up the crazy action that had now been raging across the site almost nonstop for the past nine days.
He thought to himself that the next time he was planning an evil, secret scheme designed to take over the poker world he should get his technical architects involved, it occurred to him though that once informed of his diabolical plan and their part had been played out he would probably have to kill said technicians, and that would be a real nuisance as good technical people where so hard to bloody find down here in Costa Rica!
In his palatial penthouse flat located in the apartment block commonly referred to as ‘Balla Towers’ largely due to the vast number of poker players who have set up home in the palatial block to primarily take advantage of its proximity to the Vegas Strip, Cal “Dummmm” Mikkelsen squirmed in his seat again as yet another monster pot was being electronically dragged by his latest nemesis, the eponymously titled ‘POTSHIPPER’.
Cal was beginning to worry, really worry, downswings and losing runs are nothing new to him but this, well it felt different, this felt terminal, the damage was now over nine million dollars and climbing steadily and he was fast approaching the point he would have to quit the high stakes games he had dominated for so long and start rebuilding. “MUTHFUCKA” he shouted to himself and then jumped to his feet and started pacing around his living room as yet another monster pot made its electronic journey to his opponents stack.
Cal just couldn’t shake the feeling that this was more than a down swing, this battle with POTSHIPPER has been going on for nine day’s and nights now and at times he felt like he was up against a standard strong high stakes player, just like so many he had destroyed before. But at other times, well it was like he was playing a super man, a soul reader, he said aloud, “Your losing it Cal, get a grip, you’ll start wearing tin foil hats and be joining the scientologists before too long”.
Cal tried hard to block out this disturbing train of thought but try as he might his own subconscious was conspiring against him, It wasn’t so much that there had been many suspicious calls or particularly strange plays, in fact it was just the opposite, it just seemed that every time Cal had a very strong hand and POTSHIPPER had an even stronger hand his opponent had without fail made the very maximum, and when roles where reversed it was exactly the opposite, he still got paid on his big hands but it just seemed to be the very minimum, every single time, without fail.
Maybe he’d put a call into the sites CEO and majority share holder, Howard, Cal knew he was lucky enough that as a sponsored pro he had the kind of access others only dreamed of, he was also sure that if there was anything suspicious about the games, Howard Lindeman a man of infinite resource would be sure to find it, and anyway at the very least it would put his mind at ease so he could concentrate on winning back some of his money from this arsehole.
Across the other side of the world Alex ‘POTSHIPPER’ Smythe closed down the special poker client that he had received two weeks previous and which was largely responsible for the current super high stakes carnage on FlushedOut.Com, which until last week had been the worlds second largest poker site but was now number one and by some considerable margin too.
Alex knew exactly why he had been selected by Lindeman for this particular ‘project’; he had exactly the right profile to pull something like this off. Only two weeks previously he had been grinding away at the high stakes taking the occasional shots at the nose bleed limits frequented by the online super stars. As confident as Alex was in his own abilities he still had to admit that on each of his little trips to the deepest end of the poker shark pool he had felt somewhat out of depth.
In fact Alex was starting to doubt his ability to crack the very highest levels of the game when out of the blue he received a phone call from Howard Lindeman who Alex presumed he must have made quite an impression upon when they had played together during one of Alex’s rare foreign poker trips to play in the FlushedOut.Com sponsored, South African Super Millions tournament.
Alex wasn’t aware but Lindeman had known plenty about Alex long before there one and only meeting, in truth Lindeman being drawn in the seat to Alex’s left had not been a coincidence at all. In fact Lindeman knew all the high stakes poker players on his site and had been on the look out for a player with the right profile for some time now, he needed someone on the verge of moving into the nose bleed stakes games with exceptionally good statistics in the area of extracting value, this he knew would make a sudden burst of success at the very highest stakes believable.
Lindeman was a man of powerful intellect, a graduate of America’s finest technical university and fiercely driven he had established himself as a hugely successful entrepreneur by the time he was in his late thirties. But even Lindeman with all his mental agility had trouble disguising the huge number of questions he needed answering to have a chance of correctly gauging the young man to his rights level of ambition and more importantly the direction of his moral compass, after a long day at the tables though he had the information he needed, the boy was hungry for success, very hungry.
A few months later with the help of FlushedOut.Com’s operations manager who just happened to also be one of Lindeman’s oldest and most trusted friends and a very expensive and very corrupt contract programmer, a unique version of the sites poker client was developed that enabled the user to see both sets of hole cards, after testing this was sent to Alex from Lindeman’s FlushedOut.Com email address with a note that simply said, ‘Where in this together, be smart – Your friend, Howard J. Lindeman’. The follow up phone call was just to make sure the client was working, nothing else was to be discussed, ever.
As he logged off for the night Alex realised just how drained he was, playing a believable game of poker when you can see both sets of hole cards was thoroughly exhausting, just keeping the appearance of being on the level whilst having all available information and the ability to play perfect poker was very draining, mind you the millions of dollars pouring into his online account more than made up for a day or two of mental exhaustion!
Howard Lindeman was sat in his companies Monday morning review, present as always are all of the companies senior managers and they are busy reviewing the weekends figures and issues, Howard fought hard to prevent his obvious boredom showing and was only faintly amused at the spectacle of each head of department trying there very best to take credit for the huge upswing in the positive figures experienced since the POTSHIPPER games had started in such earnest.
Lucy Montage stood up and started to present her departments strategy for managing the current upswing in the company’s fortunes, Lucy was possibly the most successful marketing manager Lindeman had ever employed but he hated her with a passion. Lucy seemed to think everything and everyone was beneath her, Lindeman was aware she envied and loathed him in equal measure, and although her thoroughly polished veneer did its best to hide it she was deferring to him through gritted teeth and would stab in him the back as soon as the right opportunity presented itself.
“Howard” Lucy screeched at the top of her voice, which was a long way up, “I beseech you to grasp this opportunity that has presented itself” she continued, “Around the world people are calling these poker matches the true world championships of poker”, Howard couldn’t help but notice that Lucy seemed to physically spit the word ‘poker’ out, it was as if she was trying to get this filthy adjective as far from her mouth as quickly as possible, Howard thought it must be hard for someone who hated poker to the extent Lucy clearly did to spend long days working for the worlds largest poker room, this thought made him smile for probably the first time today.
Lucy continued for some time to come, she was presenting a grandiose plan to hold a new world championship of poker, online to start and live to finish with of course FlushedOut.Com being the venue. Through out his star marketing managers presentation, Howard let her take the plaudits for this masterful idea, although of course this was all part of his grand plan he wanted it to appear as if she was a firmly the helm, on occasion though he did have to push the project in certain directions and pull it in others, but overall the team had no doubt whose plan it was, Lucy’s, all the better thought Howard, he wanted his finger prints as far from the gun as possible.
Eventually Howard extracted himself from the meeting and was happy to leave the minutiae of the plan to his hoard of minions. He reached his desk just in time to pick up a call on his special private line reserved for high rollers and business partners. It was the online superstar himself Cal ‘Dummmm’ Mikkelsen, “Cal my boy, how are you doing” Howard said trying hard to maintain the paternal tone he always took with his stable of young superstar players. Cal briskly outlined his concerns and Howard worked hard to allay his fears, he didn’t feel the slightest compunction about lying to his young ward, after all the little bastard had made a fool out of him several times on national TV, and bluffing was certainly a big part of both players game.
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[...] Manish Mishra wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptHoward Lindeman was sat in his enormous and luxurious office and from behind his humongous desk he was happily observing a bank of oversized wall mounted flat. [...]