Online poker is has changed the game and its complexity ever since people passed around virtual cards on Planet Poker or Paradise Poker. Then an accountant named Moneymaker came along to snuff out the unlit cigarette of long time pro Sammy Farha to win the World Series of Poker Main Event and change the face of poker forever.

The online scene has brought the backrooms of poker to the forefront of corporate and television viewing. Prizepools and tournament sizes for buy ins of $1,500 to $25,000 have exploded into weekly gatherings versus the once a year WSOP. Now, the evolution of the online game is occurring. As Lee Jones writes for Biggerdeal.com, the UIGEA has forced that evolution even more quickly.

Along with the readily available poker books, those who study the game seriously online have multiple available tools to seek a legal advantage over the person looking for a little gambling fun on a Saturday night.

Being anonymous online can help you disguise yourself against these tools and as Jones writes in his post "The Anonymous Userid for Online Poker" he draws out reasoning for allowing players to become anonymous and protect the "fish" against the "sharks" in order to keep the online game flowing with new players.

Here's a snipet of the post (kudos to Iggy for the find):

Important note: I used to work for PokerStars; I don't any more. What I'm writing here is my opinion, and not necessarily PokerStars' opinion. Please don't confuse the two.

An interesting thread has started up on 2+2 - the original poster suggests that online poker players be identified as simply "Player1", "Player2", or other relatively random names. His argument, of course, is that this will render useless much of the player tracking software that the serious online players use.

I've been in favor of something like this for a while now. In fact, about a year ago, I wrote a proposal to do just this and passed it around to a few colleagues.

My basic proposal was that a player be given the option to have a one-time disposable userid for a single session. For simplicity, let's define a session as the time from when you log into your poker client to the time you log out. If you don't care to be anonymous - if you want everybody to know that you're "Sheets", "Curtains", or any other home decorating item - fine. But players who wish to be anonymous can be.

Here is my argument:
Any healthy ecosystem relies on some kind of balance between the predators and the prey. I won't bore you with real world examples - it's easy enough (and fascinating) to look 'em up. Unfortunately, due to various human tendencies, there are also plenty of real world examples of what happens when that balance is messed up (the ecosystem goes all out of whack)... (continued on the link)