In a move that has drawn much criticism from players and industry observers, Bodog suddenly and without warning removed all screen names from its real money cash and tournament games on November 30th. Players are instead identified by numbers (e.g., 1-6 at a six-handed table), and personalized avatars have also been removed.

Also gone is the ability to keep player notes as well as other features such as being able to see mucked cards in hand histories. In other words, the ability to keep track of one's own play has been made especially arduous, and to keep track of that of others essentially impossible.

While the wholesale shift to anonymous play by Bodog is unprecedented, other online poker sites have experimented with anonymous play before. PartyPoker allows players to change their screen names and also has offered anonymous heads-up play. The Microgaming Network (including such sites as Unibet, Ladbrokes Poker, and others) has offered anonymous heads-up games for about a year and has announced plans to expand its offerings for anonymous play. And for a long time Cake Poker has allowed players to change their usernames once every seven days, although one could still take notes on an opponent that would remain in place even after he or she made a name change.

Among the negative responses to Bodog's decision has been an expression of concern by many players over security issues. How, for instance, might one pursue a complaint against collusion if one has little to no information about hands played or identifiers with which to report one's opponents? The legacy of so-called "insider cheating scandals" at other sites -- namely Absolute Poker and UltimateBet -- only adds another layer of concern for many.

One might also compare the idea of anonymous online poker to other financial transactions made over the internet. Think about it. How willing are you to send or receive money online with someone about whom you have little or no information? And for which your ability to chronicle details of the transaction was limited as well?

Setting aside for a moment the genuine concern players should have about the security of anonymous online poker, one other complaint that has been gathering momentum is the charge that anonymous poker somehow destroys something essential to the game -- that the removal of personal identifiers finally settles that argument mentioned above that online poker is somehow not "real poker."

Nick Jones of PokerFuse offered an editorial recently in which he specifically argued that Bodog's anonymous tables utterly removed "one of the game's fundamental parts," namely, "that it is social." The erasure of avatars, screen names, color-coding, and player notes thus turns poker into a "dry video game" in which the sense of isolation that is already part of online poker gets heightened considerably.

It's just you and your faceless foes, numbers two, three, four, five, and six. And when you leave the table, you'll never see them again. Thus does Jones consider Bodog's move to be an attempt to "change the nature of poker" into something he believes most players will reject precisely because the social element has been diminished too greatly.

Jones makes a good point, although it should be noted that the online game already introduces quite a bit of change to "the nature of poker," so much so that many believe it should be considered a different game altogether. Truth be told, all of the "social" aspects of the game he values -- "the tells, the reads, the psychology and the table banter" -- are necessarily muted and/or transformed online.

The development of online poker over the last decade-plus has been primarily influenced by the live game, with most sites basing the games they offer fairly closely upon elements of live poker. But as time passed we've grown accustomed to certain aspects of the online game that are wholly unique -- e.g., the faster pace of play, multi-tabling, the availability of micro-stakes games, variations on how rake or table charges are collected, among many more.

Later came the introduction of other online-only forms of poker such as "Rush Poker" and multi-entry tournaments on the ill-fated Full Tilt Poker site. Or huge-field tournaments with tens of thousands of players such as the record-setting one on PokerStars last Sunday in which 200,000 participated.

In fact, way back in 2002 the always against-the-grain Mike Caro, a.k.a., the "Mad Genius of Poker," pointed out how the advent of online gambling games need not require the creators of those games to try to simulate live games. Rather, those building such sites were free to "come up with games truly creative and attractive that weren't tied to real-world physics."

Interestingly, Caro had (and has) opinions about the online game despite having authored Caro's Book of Poker Tells, a highly influential poker strategy book focusing solely on live play. (By the way, that picture above offers a playful variation on one of the photographs appearing in Caro's book.)

Such innovations weren't really happening a decade ago when online poker was in its infancy. But we're seeing them more and more today, with some of these ideas making online poker different from the live game perhaps better than others.

To me, security concerns plus still highly-uncertain state of online poker in the U.S. add up to my staying away from Bodog. As suggested above, when it comes to financial transactions online, I like to have at least some knowledge of the other party.

Even if our transaction is contingent upon one of us making the better hand.

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