Donkey Manifesto Interviews Lee Jones

Hello fellow Manifestites! This is it, the interview you've all been waiting for (or not, since I never mentioned who was going to be interviewed here) - the man behind the scenes, the one and only Lee Jones, PokerStars Poker Room Manager! In this interview, we touch on all of the subjects you, the viewers, want to see. The doom switch? It's here. Multiple accounts? It's here. Transsexual, one-legged midget tossing? Umm, no, that's not here. But the rest is here for your reading enjoyment.

Donkey Manifesto: We can read the bio on www.pokerstars.com, but tell us, in your own words, who IS Lee Jones?

Lee Jones: Who am I? Actually, two different guys. One is a poker-site-running adrenaline junkie. The other fellow is a family person who likes sitting around and playing his Scheerhorn resophonic guitar and his Wayne Henderson dreadnought six-string guitar. It gets crowded in here sometimes.

DM: How did you first get involved with PokerStars? Did you start out as the poker room manager, or did you have to clean the tables and deliver drinks and things to get your foot in the door?

LJ: I worked for PokerStars for three months before becoming the poker room manager. It gave me a chance to study with the veterans and learn from them before I took this role. Fortunately, I only had to bus tables for a week.

DM: Aside from your final table appearances at the big Sunday tournaments, what does the job of manager of an online poker room entail? Making sure that the server button is in the on position, plugging in loose cables...?

LJ: Actually, I have nothing to do with the hardware. They said something about slapping my hands if I got near the servers. I help with policy decisions, review escalations of customer issues, make posts to various poker forums, etc. My favorite bit of the job is talking to players via email, chatting at the table, and in person.

DM: Speaking of the Sunday tournaments, do you feel the blind structure/chip stacks allow for enough play? Many people feel it gets very crap-shooty towards the middle-late stages of the tourney. Are there plans to adjust the tourney structure, or is it good as is?

LJ: Actually, we just did a minor tweak to the tournament structure to address that - the early reviews are very positive. However...

[soapbox]
The PLAYERS are largely responsible for that dice throwing that's going on, and here's why: as the bubble starts to approach, they start stalling (a topic about which I just wrote in Card Player). And when they stall, guess what happens? They get fewer hands per level. When they get fewer hands per level, the blinds go up "faster". I've actually written a computer program to analyze the stack:blind ratios in our tournaments and to track how many hands get dealt at each level. The pre-bubble stalling is clearly a major component of the stack compression that you're seeing. No structure change is going to fix it as long as that clock-eating continues.
[/soapbox]

[DM Comment: This makes sense, but I'm not sure what can be done. A majority of the players in the Sunday tourneys satellite in, so the $350 or whatever prize for just making the money is a significant amount for them. The problem is, short of lowering the time bank/time allowed per move specifically during the bubble period, what else can be done?]

DM: Keeping on the topic of the Sunday tournaments, how long does it take you to come up with those witty remarks once people bust from the final table? Do you scope out the chip leaders a few tables out and start to come up with them? Or do you have a special software program that you can plug in online names and it spits out a witty one liner?

LJ: I have the sorted of twisted mind that thinks of those silly one-liners on the fly. Every once in a while I see one at the beginning of the final table and think "THERE'S a good one." The best one I ever did? Why, thank you for asking. It wasn't even when somebody busted out. I had shown up before the final table and so the railbirds were still chattering. One of them said, "Hey Lee - what's jennicide's home phone number?" Without dropping a beat, I replied: "Jennicide's home phone number is 867-5309." Sometimes I slay me :-).

[Morphy: First song I ever did in a band (I'm a bassist, for those who care). Boy does THAT bring back memories. The big question is: of the oodles of 16 year old fan-boys railing Jennicide, how many didn't get the reference and ran to their phones ?]

DM: What's your favorite salad dressing? Do you like croutons?

LJ: I'm actually not much of a salad dressing fan. I like 'em all, but in very small doses. It keeps the fat down and enhances the flavor of the salad. Not many people know this, but I lost about 35 pounds four years ago and have kept it off since. Salad dressing is not my friend. Croutons have to be fresh to be worth it. I make mine by getting French bread, chopping it into small pieces, dusting it with olive oil, basil, and garlic, and then baking in a 300-degree oven until crunchy. The resulting croutons go on the salad still warm. Yum.

DM: Of all the features on PokerStars, what are you proud of the most? What sets PokerStars above the rest of the sites?

LJ: The three best things about PokerStars:

1. The fundamental commitment to honesty and integrity. Nothing surpasses that.
2. The customer service. When we get new people into PokerStars, we often tell them, "Work hard to find a reason to say 'yes' to the customer." It's much more fun working for a company like that.
3. The software - our software is the best in the business, and we think
*daily* about how to make it even better.

Of course, if you go back and look at that list, you realize it all comes down to the people. My colleagues, across the organization, are the nuts, pure and simple.

[DM Comment: No, the word "the" was not added in as a post-interview edit.]

DM: Many people have talked about Stars and other sites having a so-called "doom switch." Can you tell us more about this? Is it really a switch, or is it more of a button? Along those lines, do you have a special "doom phone" that rings every time a particular player logs on so that you can run and put your "doom suit" on, slide down the "doom pole" go into the "doom control room" and flip the "doom switch" on?

LJ: Unfortunately, I can't even make jokes about this. I'd like to (and we routinely make the jokes ourselves during the staff tournaments). But it's kind of like joking about bombs in airports. There are too many people that really believe it, so I can't even make a joke about it for fear of that quote appearing, implying serious context, on pocketfives or whatever.

While I'm here, can I say something about the PokerStars staff tournaments? No - there is no prize. Not a good parking place for a month. Not a free pizza or anything else. It's our only chance to play on the site and it gives us a chance to put the same bad beats that we inflect on you folks daily.

[DM Comment: You mean people on the internet might read something meant as sarcasm and take it literally? No way! It's too bad the believers of the doom switch can't have an out of body experience to see how incredibly stupid they look.]

DM: I've heard PokerStars referred to as RiverStars several times while playing on the site. Is the PokerStars building located on a river of some sort, or other body of water?

LJ: What I love is playing on other sites (because of course I can't play on PokerStars). Whenever a whacky river card comes up, some genius will always say "That could *only* happen on *THIS* site." Yes, except for all the other ones. And furthermore, we don't deal any more whacky river cards than we deal turn cards. I never see us being called "Turnstars". Can you explain *that* to me?

[Morphy: Well, it's funny you mention that. Just the other night Muk and I were discussing the phenomenon that was quickly coined "The turn of a thousand draws." :)]

DM: Online poker can be a dark and evil place. There are a lot of idiots out there, and a lot of people looking to cheat the system in order to make money. With all of the possible cheating methods out there, could you tell me a little more about how Stars is going to prevent what many feel is the biggest problem the site faces; that is, people using ugly baby pictures as their avatars?

LJ: Well, I wasn't going to discuss this in today's interview, but because you asked... we have acquired some advanced pattern recognition software from the U.S. military. We are devoting a server to running this software full-time for the recognition and removal of ugly baby pictures. In fact, I have actually had conversations with Mike O'Malley at Party Poker about sharing the names of players who put ugly avatars on our site because we assume that anybody doing that is probably cheating in other, though less serious, ways as well.

[DM Comment: Have you also considered contacting www.darwinawards.com to see if something can be done before these people are allowed to breed again?]

DM: Recently Stars announced that 100,000 people were online simultaneously. Many people have speculated that the "poker boom" has reached its peak, but based on these numbers and the ever increasing numbers in the Sunday tourneys, it doesn't appear to be peaking anytime soon. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think online poker has reached its peak? What do you see as the typical online average number of players on PokerStars, say, 2 years from now?

LJ: According to my calculations, we will have every man, woman, and child on the planet playing at PokerStars within five years. We are already starting an affiliate program on Rigel 7.

[DM Comment: Sign up with PokerStars now and receive a free 10oz vial of space dust!]

DM: For a more controversial topic, obviously you're aware of the situation with JJProdigy, and more recently, the situation with ZeeJustin. Let's take Zee for example. One of the lesser-known theories is that Zee had multiple personalities, as well as imaginary friends. From what I understand, he is considering suing Party Poker because he feels that while having separate accounts for his multiple personalities might be bordering on illegal activity, there's no way Party should have closed the accounts of his imaginary friends. He's claiming pain and suffering damages due to their poor attitudes at his tea parties. Do you have any comments on this, or are you burned out on the topic of cheating?

LJ: Actually, I just finished reading "Sybil" - a legendary book about a woman who was diagnosed with sixteen separate personalities, two of whom were male (the story is true). It occurred to me that this would give a whole new meaning to the concept of "switching gears". Eventually (through hard work and psychotherapy) her 16 personalities were integrated back together. It made her happier, but probably cost her enormous poker EV.

DM: Right now you’re in Monte Carlo for the European Poker Tour event. Tell me about some of the places you’ve been able to visit while “on the job.” Do you have any stories you would like to share?

LJ: I've been very fortunate to see some wonderful and interesting places as part of my job with PokerStars. Unfortunately, I'm often parked in a ballroom that's been turned into a poker room. So perhaps I should say that I've been in ballrooms in some of the most exotic places in the world. However, it's a honor and a privilege working with the PokerStars staff at these events and the opportunity to put on the top quality tournaments we do is well worth the sacrifice of missing the beach or the Cirque du Soleil show.


Lee, we want to thank you for your time and effort to make this interview happen. Feel free to stop by and say hi when you can, and we hope that PokerStars continues to get better in every way for the poker community. Manifestites, until next time!

Yours Donkily,

Morphy and Muk