Deja Vu

"It'll all end in tears"

Mum always would say that when me and my brother, who had the huge advantage of ten years growth on me, started play-fighting. She was right 99% of the time. And now something round my neck of the woods is ending in virtual tears too. The Brit-bloggerment as it became known appears to be no more. The official reason is dwindling numbers but the cause of the dwindling numbers is down to the so-called banter during the game.

I've been on a refresher course for work recently. It was about e-communication. Email, IM, Forums, Chat windows. The main factoid upon which the course hung was that in 50% of all e-comms the tone of the message is misinterpreted, but 90% of e-comms recipients think they have interpreted the correct tone. That's a massive gap of miscommunication to fill and the course went on to teach us how to identify statements that can be misconstrued, ensure you just state the facts etc etc.

This is easy enough to do at work, but with the emotion and adrenalin of cards falling it's even easier. Various situations have arisen where I'm sure people where trying to be amusing, or were having a "in joke" that was amusing to someone, that has clearly hurt someone else's pride at the table. This quickly escalates into a flame war and has caused the situation happening today.

I am 90% sure that when this all started it was "a bit of banter", but its very easy for it not to be seen that way. I have been on the receiving end of it at one of the forums I post at. Every time a hand history question is asked one poster responds in manner that can easily be construed as "WTF did you do that for". He probably doesn't mean for it sound that way, but it’s the way it comes across and it takes a degree of restraint not to get defensive about ones responses.

My final word on the matter is that it's a great shame and slightly embarrassing that things didn't work out. But life goes on so turn the chat-box off and let your cards do the talking.

On a brighter note I'm starting to think this blog could do with some more pictures or hand vids like I did a while ago so I'll probably going to start recording some of my tourneys again and hopefully will get the flash player working properly this time (some folks had trouble seeing the videos previously). It should brighten the posts up a bit as I'm sure ya'll getting bored reading about how I just made the money and failed to take down yet another online tournament.

Thanks for reading. Until next time I'll mostly be trying to build my bankroll at Stars and Bodog. Good luck on the felt.