Fun, right?

One of my favorite iPhone/iPod Touch apps is 'Poker 6k'. As you can probably guess from the name, it's a multiplayer poker game.

I've written before on the sheer pointlessness of just joining a 'table' and playing a regular game, but today I discovered something even worse.

You see, I only ever play in tournaments because the idiots who like to go all in, on the first hand, before the flop can't ruin the game by buying back in. When they insist on going all in on the first hand, all they're doing is improving your 1 in 9 chance of winning to 1 in 6…or so I thought.

I played a few games today and I noticed the same thing over and over.

Ok, before I go into this, let me ask you a question. What is the one and only reason to play multiplayer poker when you're not playing for real money?

Fun, right? Well, someone explain to me how this 'tactic' is in any way fun:

When you play a tournament, everyone puts up the same stake, but everyone plays with just $1000 worth of chips. Then it's a matter of eliminating your opponents by busting them out. Third place gets 20% of all the stake money, second gets 30% and first place gets 50%.

So, at first, I thought I was just playing with a few idiots who like to go all in so they can 'bluff'. Then I noticed what they were doing.

These guys are joining tournaments, going all in and hoping two or three other people do the same…then, if they win and get the massive chip-lead from taking all two other players chips on the first hand, they just automatically fold over and over for the rest of the game, hoping they'll be in the final three before their chips run out.

Technically, this isn't a bad tactic. Starting with 9 players, if you succeed in winning the first hand going all in and eliminate two players, suddenly you have $3000 while the remaining six players only have $1000. Then, it's fairly likely if you fold on every hand and only lose chips when you have to pay a blind that you'll still be around when the remaining players (the ones actually playing poker) have busted out four more players.

However…what kind of gigantic ass-hat plays like this? You're taking a fun game of poker and reducing it to pushing a single button over and over in order to make your meaningless number bigger than everyone else's meaningless number.

I need to set up a friends list of people who actually play games for fun.