Saturday, October 9, 2010

Online Poker

So I decided fuck it, and started playing today. It's one of those things you have to do to get better at anyway, so I will read in between playing. I am impatient what can I say. So far I have learned a few valueable lessons, allow me to share them:

#1 North America, Banks, and Credit card companies all hate any form of online gambling. Screw all of you, I funded my account anyway. I wish birth defects upon your children.

#2 Set your fiters before choosing your game. I joined a $1.10 tournament without realizing the implications of a tournament allowing rebuys and reloads. Horrible, horrible idea. Would be fine if I could have cashed out, but playing against 2300 people who keep rebuying and going all in every goddamn time they lose is very frustrating.

This was generally the scenario every few hands: Someone goes all in. Three other people follow. 1-3 of them get knocked out. 1-3 of them immediately double back up on chips (1 dollar per 2000 chips) so they are back at 4000 chips. They go all in again. Rinse and repeat until they manage to double up.

I paid only the initial 1.10 and managed to get up to around 100th place for chips when some douche I had taken to zero twice managed to double up on me twice. I think he had a grudge. I would make the same decision now, unfortunately he just had the cards. I then made an idiotic call I would not make again, and my large stack of chips became a miniscule stack of chips. I entered push fold mode and got unlucky, so finished 20xx I looked at the tournament stats and seen something like the following:
Number of players 2165
Players Remaining: 2054
Buyins:                   4530

I am kind of curious how long that tournament takes to finish.

#3 Unless you are so loaded the bonus dollars don't matter to you, the bonus codes don't matter to you. Funny how that works, eh? You are awarded the "bonus" dollars based on a point system which rewards you the more you play. What it basically means you need to spend more than 3x that amount to collect, so unless you are winning more than you're losing in the tournaments you are playing it is not worth it. You also only get points for games around a buck and higher. It makes fiscal sense, but it's unfortunate because I can not benefit with my bank roll and confidence level where it is.

So after making the few mistakes I did and losing $1.10, I switched to 380 person tournaments with a $0.10 ante (yup, a dime. Fucking awesome), and 45 person tournaments with a $0.25 ante. I placed fourth in one of the $0.10 tournaments, and all in all seem to be doing quite well so I will continue tomorrow and hopefully improve some more.

It's too bad I entered that useless 1.00 tournament, but despite that I am currently $1.15 cents in the green. That may be a low number, but first prize is only like 8 bucks and I am more concerned with gaining skill and experience so this pleases me greatly. I deposited a mere $50.00 as seed money, so I need to grow that before I can progress to more expensive games.

Current total: $51.15
Tournaments played today: 5

If you think about it this means I can play 11 more 0.10 tournaments before going back into my original deposit. I am fairly good at tournaments, so I think I can grind out a few more top 5 finishes and get this up to at least 70 bucks within the week. Must remember to continue reading and working on being able to do quick calculations and such however, as fun as actually playing is it's much funner when you win.

Cheers.

2 comments:

  1. Cool post, I play some online poker, well used to, not so much now. What site do you use? May have to get back involved!

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  2. Using poker stars atm, it's the only one I've tried. Seems good thus far, lots of options tons of tournaments.

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