It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to poker recently that things got a bit spirited when Kat Arnsby joined The Chip Race hosts and Unibet ambassadors Dara O’Kearney and David Lappin on their spinoff show, The Lock-In. Emerging during the height of the lockdown periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Lock-In is a casual carry-on from the more formal Chip Race shows.
The YouTube spinoff is a talking-heads-style video podcast that typically features an in-depth discussion of a variety of topics in poker with a single guest. Episodes vary in length, but putting aside an hour to watch is probably a decent guess in most cases.
In the most recent edition of The Lock-In, a long-time friend of hosts and “their boss” at Unibet Kat “ThePokerBaffer” Arnsby joined the pair to discuss bots, fashion choices, and the GPI Awards. As Arnsby is well-known for her no-nonsense, direct, and informed approach to discussions, with the equally well-prepared and tenacious hosts the hour promised to be full of quotable moments.
To no one’s surprise, it didn’t disappoint on that front with Arnsby’s opening salvo coming just moments into the first topic. Before she got into the controversies, however, she stunned the poker world with a major announcement that will see her leaving the poker industry in the near future.
ThePokerBaffer Just TheBaffer Now?
While she provided little in the way of details, Arnsby announced she’d be leaving Unibet in the near future to move into a job that is unrelated to poker.
In the first 5 minutes of the show, Arnsby made her big announcement, complete with some friendly ribbing from Lappin. She wasn’t able to talk about what the new opportunity would entail, but she did say it was the first time in her life she wasn’t working for a company that was related to a poker room, at least tangentially.
While it sounds like her love of the game hasn’t diminished, she has grown disillusioned with the online poker industry she’s been a part of. At least part of that frustration comes out later in discussions around bots, but whether she is in the industry or not, it still seems likely players will see her at the live tables, drink in hand, playing cards.
“It’s Just Fucking Hypocrisy”
One of the joys of Arnsby’s media appearances is that a viewer knows they will get her unfiltered opinion and with Lappin acting as circus master and O’Kearney providing his own brand of direct, informed opinion, this always looked to be a potentially explosive episode. And right out of the gate, when discussing the recent controversy between Justin Bonomo and the WSOP, she didn’t disappoint.
After an opening discussion from O’Kearney that highlighted the dichotomy between the “political nature” of the charity tournament WSOP sponsored in the same series and the operator’s response to Bonomo’s “political” clothing choice, Anrsby summed it up in her own unique style. “Well, it’s just fucking hypocrisy, isn’t it?” (7:07)
One valuable point brought up by Arnsby concerned the media and social reaction to the controversy. She pointed to comments by Mike “the Mouth” Matusow and contrasted them with the response of bracelet and EPT winner Barny Boatman. She pointed to Boatman’s balanced approach to the topic (the OG legend set up an auction for his first WSOP bracelet with proceeds going to the Palestinian Red Crescent) and questioned why so much of the media attention to the controversy was focused on the far less balanced comments of Matusow rather than Boatman’s approach.
“Only one [media piece] mentioned Barny’s gesture and everyone else mentioned Mike Matusow’s comments. … So, just as an aside, could all the poker media outlets just stop giving a shit what Mike Matusow thinks? … More Barny, less “the Mouth” Matusow would be my vote on that.” (11:00)
That set the tone for the rest of the interview and it was a good one, as usual. While the three largely agreed on the hypocrisy of WSOP sponsoring a tournament dedicated to victims on one side of an ongoing regional conflict while penalizing a player for wearing clothing that they saw as supportive of one side of an ongoing regional conflict, Arsnby has no issues disagreeing with her friends and colleagues, as was evidenced later in the bot portion of the discussion.
Online Poker is Unsustainable without Major Change
That was the main takeaway from Arnsby’s contribution to the final segment of the show. It involved the growing issue of bots in online poker, and provided quite a range of views from the three participants. In the part, the show referenced Poker.Pro’s GPI award-nominated investigative piece by Johnathan Raab, Transparency in Poker: A Call to Action for the Community.
In the longest segment of the episode that included part of a Sigma panel Lappin and Arnsby were part of in Malta hosted by Ivonne Montealegre, the hosts and guest diverged quite a bit in their opinions. While O’Kearny and Lappin both came down firmly on the side of keeping bots out of the game, Arnsby’s more surprising take was that online poker needs more bots.
She made the case that the existing models with ~40% retention are likely not sustainable long-term for poker sites and there needs to be major innovations in the sphere for its long-term health and viability. Her idea, which she admitted was just that and noted that other, better ideas might be out there, was that house-controlled bots could be good for the game.
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A “More Rake is Better” Moment?
In 2018, Daniel Negreanu made some comments that were distilled into “More rake is better” and received some backlash from the poker world as a result (with “some backlash” a bit of a dramatic understatement). While she may not appreciate the comparison, Arnsby’s take shared many structural similarities with Negreanu’s back in 2018.
Both are about the structural soundness of the online poker industry models in play at the time of the statements, and both are direct suggestions from people “in the know” about existing problems with business models and possible fixes to those problems. And both take a similar approach through different mechanisms.
The “More rake is better” approach essentially boiled down to the idea that by taking a larger share of the buy-in before the games started, operator revenue could be increased with more money to return to losing players on the site to preserve their bankrolls a bit longer. Roughly the same logic seems to underpin Arnsby’s idea here.
She goes into the discussion having already assumed that the current models aren’t sustainable, and given her position at Unibet and within the industry as a whole, it seems reasonable to accept her as an expert on the subject with intimate knowledge of how those models work and what their results are industry-wide. Given the truth of the assumption, her idea is that house-controlled bots could be a way of siphoning winnings away from bigger players to put back into the poker economy by redistributing it to losing players, extending their bankroll life.
Unsurprisingly, her idea opened up a wide-ranging discussion between the three that touched on concepts like player trust, liquidity, merging with other verticals, and the differences between poker and other forms of gambling, just as a start. As expected, O’Kearney and Lappin come down firmly on the “no bot” side and make some solid trust arguments about why bots, and house-controlled bots especially, could be a massive trust issue for players.
Bonomo, Bots, and GPI, Oh My
The bot discussion kicks off at the 25:40 mark and goes on for the rest of the episode and it alone makes the episode worthwhile. In addition to the topics discussed above, the gang also weighs in on this year’s Global Poker Index (GPI) nominations, sharing insight and more than a little shade about some of this year’s nominees.
As is always the case when Arnsby, Lappin, and O’Kearney hang out, viewers will get a ton of value for no risk from the entire hour.
