I didn't feel like calling Jon to show him this painting... I figured he's sick of me after seeing me TWO weekends in a row! Haha. Anyway this is a painting I just did because I didn't go to class...enjoy.
http://www.mentalabstraction.com/Posts/GKelly4.jpg
Apr 26, 2004
Apr 25, 2004
Party Poker update
I just played a couple hours today. I played three tables for a while and was doing really well. I added another table and it started to trickle away after a while, but I got my second $100 bonus. So after my session from last night and just now, I'm overall up $288. Not very impressive considering $200 of that was bonuses, but I'll take bonuses with glee. So if you think you can at least break even try this out. Not bad for playing a few hours of online poker. I recommend playing two tables so it's not as slow, three if you can handle it. Four gets kinda crazy.
I just played a couple hours today. I played three tables for a while and was doing really well. I added another table and it started to trickle away after a while, but I got my second $100 bonus. So after my session from last night and just now, I'm overall up $288. Not very impressive considering $200 of that was bonuses, but I'll take bonuses with glee. So if you think you can at least break even try this out. Not bad for playing a few hours of online poker. I recommend playing two tables so it's not as slow, three if you can handle it. Four gets kinda crazy.
an easy $200 just for playing poker
I just opened a Party Poker account. As it turns out, we can get some sizeable bonuses just for signing up and playing. I got the 20% deposit bonus ($100) with Card Player's signup code "LEAP" and another $100 for using iGM-Pay for buying in and cashing out (deposit code "IGMPAY"). In addition to this, I will share the wealth with you guys if you sign up through my affiliate link from jhiro.net, which should give you another $65. In order to get the deposit bonuses you just need to play in 500 raked hands for each $100. This doesn't take as long if you play multiple tables at once. So all you have to do is play tight and break even at the tables to get over $200 free.
Here's what you need to do:
1. Click the Party Poker link on the cardrooms page of jhiro.net. This link takes you to the 20% bonus page.
2. Download the software and sign up for an account.
3. Use iGM-Pay to deposit your money. It is the site-recommended method and I had no trouble with it. Hopefully the $100 bonus is still there. You have to deposit $500 to get the maximum bonus, but you don't have to put all that cash in play.
more poker discussion - table selection
On a related note, I started out really bad at Party Poker. Haha. But don't worry, I can explain why and you can learn from my mistake. They have a waitlist system that allows you to get on a waitlist for a specific table, or take the first available seat among all tables. I tried the latter option at first because I was eager to see how the games were. Oops. I ended up playing simultaneously at a couple of pretty tight-aggressive $3-$6 tables. In under an hour I was down almost $200. Not feeling good at that point. I realized that the tables had small average pot sizes and that people were raising a lot, particularly preflop. Basically it was like sitting at a table where I was in every seat. Not fun, not profitable, not attractive in any sense of the word.
Now... as tight-aggressive players, as we all should be at these loose low-limit tables, what we want is the stupid callers who play any two cards. It's frustrating at times when they make a garbage two pair against our top pair top kicker, or we have a set of aces and they hit their backdoor gutshot. But these are also the guys supplying us with our profits, know and remember that. We want a lot of callers seeing the flop so that the pot is big when we finally decide to play with (A) high cards that are probably the best at the table or (B) cards we hope to draw with, in which case we definitely need a big pot for the gamble to be worth taking. We also need that pot to be big because we're paying the blinds every round and also even when we play we usually fold when the flop comes out, so on that rare occasion when we bring in a pot, it's gotta be huge. At those tight-aggressive tables, I was forced to call a raise preflop too often, and even when I won my occasional pot it was too small to keep me from watching my stacks disappear. Eventually I became aware ($200 aware) of this ugly situation and moved on to look for a better game.
So I sorted the tables by average pot size (a nice feature that Party Poker has, although I didn't see average % of players seeing the flop) and looked at the higher end. At the time, the highest average pot size was about $60, whereas my previous tables were around $30. I recommend seeking out tables with average pot sizes of $50 or higher (for $3-$6). By the way, that is not hard to find because there are so many tables and so many players. I also like to check the stats for my tables once in a while, to see if they're still looking good. If not, there are plenty of other tables to jump to.
So after a while I decided to play four tables at once, to accelerate my bonus-earning. The tables were a lot better than the ones I started with, but that big starting loss was a lot to recover from. I played several hours this way, earned my first $100 bonus and got half way to the second one. I ended the night overall up only about $45. I blame the bad tables. I expect that in the future with more careful table selection and the second $100 bonus, I'll be up quite a bit more. It was a costly lesson to learn, but it doesn't have to be so for you guys.
even more poker discussion - player sophistication
Garden City is great. At least it has been for me so far. And I think it's only going to get better with all this poker on TV and people eager to try their luck. As long as no one gives out advice on poker books to read. I need to take that page down. Anyways, the players at Garden City are likely of a different flavor than those you will encounter online. Online, you'll find tech-savvy internet nerds... like us. I think they're more likely to have done at least a little research before putting their money at risk. Maybe read a poker advice Web site, or even a book or two. At Garden City, there's a lot of foreign tongue being spoken by older gentlemen. Okay, maybe they have computers. Maybe they can read English. But it seems less likely that they've done their homework. They probably see the cardroom visits as recreation. They're throwing their money in the pot, talking and joking around calling each other uncle and master, and having a good time. They like the excitement of calling with any two cards if the pot's big, just because there's a small chance they can take it. And being over there by fancy Saratoga, it's not out of the question that some of them may be quite wealthy and not care much about walking away with fewer $1 chips than they sat down with. Kinda like if we played for pennies.
So now game selection, or opponent selection, comes into play. Online you have the big advantages of not paying a button charge every round and no dealer tipping. Those add up quick. It seems like that would make the online games the clear choice, financially at least. But I've noticed that players seem to be a little bit tighter online, even at a good loose table, than they are at the good tables at Garden City. Of course this is not always the case, but it is a general trend that I think makes sense.
So what's the point of this? I don't know. I will keep playing at Garden City because it's profitable and I like playing at a real table with real cards and chips once in a while. I will see how this Party Poker thing goes, at least til I get my second bonus. Good luck and let's all win a lot of money.
non-poker stuff
I do have a bunch of other stuff to share, but that'll have to wait til next time.
I just opened a Party Poker account. As it turns out, we can get some sizeable bonuses just for signing up and playing. I got the 20% deposit bonus ($100) with Card Player's signup code "LEAP" and another $100 for using iGM-Pay for buying in and cashing out (deposit code "IGMPAY"). In addition to this, I will share the wealth with you guys if you sign up through my affiliate link from jhiro.net, which should give you another $65. In order to get the deposit bonuses you just need to play in 500 raked hands for each $100. This doesn't take as long if you play multiple tables at once. So all you have to do is play tight and break even at the tables to get over $200 free.
Here's what you need to do:
1. Click the Party Poker link on the cardrooms page of jhiro.net. This link takes you to the 20% bonus page.
2. Download the software and sign up for an account.
3. Use iGM-Pay to deposit your money. It is the site-recommended method and I had no trouble with it. Hopefully the $100 bonus is still there. You have to deposit $500 to get the maximum bonus, but you don't have to put all that cash in play.
more poker discussion - table selection
On a related note, I started out really bad at Party Poker. Haha. But don't worry, I can explain why and you can learn from my mistake. They have a waitlist system that allows you to get on a waitlist for a specific table, or take the first available seat among all tables. I tried the latter option at first because I was eager to see how the games were. Oops. I ended up playing simultaneously at a couple of pretty tight-aggressive $3-$6 tables. In under an hour I was down almost $200. Not feeling good at that point. I realized that the tables had small average pot sizes and that people were raising a lot, particularly preflop. Basically it was like sitting at a table where I was in every seat. Not fun, not profitable, not attractive in any sense of the word.
Now... as tight-aggressive players, as we all should be at these loose low-limit tables, what we want is the stupid callers who play any two cards. It's frustrating at times when they make a garbage two pair against our top pair top kicker, or we have a set of aces and they hit their backdoor gutshot. But these are also the guys supplying us with our profits, know and remember that. We want a lot of callers seeing the flop so that the pot is big when we finally decide to play with (A) high cards that are probably the best at the table or (B) cards we hope to draw with, in which case we definitely need a big pot for the gamble to be worth taking. We also need that pot to be big because we're paying the blinds every round and also even when we play we usually fold when the flop comes out, so on that rare occasion when we bring in a pot, it's gotta be huge. At those tight-aggressive tables, I was forced to call a raise preflop too often, and even when I won my occasional pot it was too small to keep me from watching my stacks disappear. Eventually I became aware ($200 aware) of this ugly situation and moved on to look for a better game.
So I sorted the tables by average pot size (a nice feature that Party Poker has, although I didn't see average % of players seeing the flop) and looked at the higher end. At the time, the highest average pot size was about $60, whereas my previous tables were around $30. I recommend seeking out tables with average pot sizes of $50 or higher (for $3-$6). By the way, that is not hard to find because there are so many tables and so many players. I also like to check the stats for my tables once in a while, to see if they're still looking good. If not, there are plenty of other tables to jump to.
So after a while I decided to play four tables at once, to accelerate my bonus-earning. The tables were a lot better than the ones I started with, but that big starting loss was a lot to recover from. I played several hours this way, earned my first $100 bonus and got half way to the second one. I ended the night overall up only about $45. I blame the bad tables. I expect that in the future with more careful table selection and the second $100 bonus, I'll be up quite a bit more. It was a costly lesson to learn, but it doesn't have to be so for you guys.
even more poker discussion - player sophistication
Garden City is great. At least it has been for me so far. And I think it's only going to get better with all this poker on TV and people eager to try their luck. As long as no one gives out advice on poker books to read. I need to take that page down. Anyways, the players at Garden City are likely of a different flavor than those you will encounter online. Online, you'll find tech-savvy internet nerds... like us. I think they're more likely to have done at least a little research before putting their money at risk. Maybe read a poker advice Web site, or even a book or two. At Garden City, there's a lot of foreign tongue being spoken by older gentlemen. Okay, maybe they have computers. Maybe they can read English. But it seems less likely that they've done their homework. They probably see the cardroom visits as recreation. They're throwing their money in the pot, talking and joking around calling each other uncle and master, and having a good time. They like the excitement of calling with any two cards if the pot's big, just because there's a small chance they can take it. And being over there by fancy Saratoga, it's not out of the question that some of them may be quite wealthy and not care much about walking away with fewer $1 chips than they sat down with. Kinda like if we played for pennies.
So now game selection, or opponent selection, comes into play. Online you have the big advantages of not paying a button charge every round and no dealer tipping. Those add up quick. It seems like that would make the online games the clear choice, financially at least. But I've noticed that players seem to be a little bit tighter online, even at a good loose table, than they are at the good tables at Garden City. Of course this is not always the case, but it is a general trend that I think makes sense.
So what's the point of this? I don't know. I will keep playing at Garden City because it's profitable and I like playing at a real table with real cards and chips once in a while. I will see how this Party Poker thing goes, at least til I get my second bonus. Good luck and let's all win a lot of money.
non-poker stuff
I do have a bunch of other stuff to share, but that'll have to wait til next time.
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