Here’s the story.  I have played quite a bit over the last year or so, and I am not a horrible player, not a great player… middle of the road and in with the right groups I can make some money at it and have a good time.  I don’t make the money fast enough to make it a living or anything, but it wouldn’t be unusual to make $100 or so a night net for a few tables.  Not a great amount of money, but I am not a big money player so no big deal, right?

Anyway, about a month ago, I realized that I still had 10,000 or so Party Points in my account.  I had recently cashed in almost all the cash in my account, so I figured I would play some points tournaments for a while to keep in practice, while not really putting any more money on the table for a while.  No reason to throw money at it when I can get into some pretty interesting tournaments with points, right?

Now, I don’t typically do so well at big tournaments.  I have some issues with attention span I guess, and I get pretty antsy after sitting for a couple of hours and want to get on with it.   With some concentration I can pretty much make it to the money, but not much further.  So I play my points with the idea to try some different strategies for getting to the end of the tournament.  Some worked better than others, as you can imagine.

Anyway, I log in yesterday, and suddenly my account has no more Party Points in it.   Guess which poker company added in a new rule that says “if you don’t earn any new points in 30 days, we take all your existing points away”?  It is change from their “account not active” rule they use to have, so now you literally have to put money on the table every 30 days or your points are withdrawn.

This rather major change wasn’t exactly made public.   I had played down just over 5000 party points in a month, and they wandered away with the other half of my points.

So, pick up the phone and call their support center, and well, that is when the fun starts.  (I am not going to be racist here… but) It doesn’t take too much intelligence to realize that the call center is located in India.  Professional script reads and totally helpless otherwise.  I described my problem, and the person on the phone proceeded to lecture me about not playing enough, and how I should read the rules because I obviously don’t understand how the party points system works, and that it is my fault that I didn’t read the rule carefully.  I don’t disagree that I should stay up to date, but I missed this last change, and they didn’t go out of their way to update their members about this points grab.

I tried to explain how this was different from the terms when I signed up, and the guy had the balls to say “It is your job to re-read the rules regularly.  Things change, and that is your responsiblity to re-read those rules on a regular basis.”

I asked them to close my account.  I didn’t call for a lecture.  This guy won’t close the account, but keeps trying to restart his lecture about my responsiblities to check the terms regularly.

STFU already.  CLOSE MY ACCOUNT.

He won’t do it.  I am steaming by this point.  How hard is it to close an account?  He is waffling, trying to once again launch into his prepared speech about my responsilbities… and I had to bite my tongue to keep from going off on this breathing automon of a “service” agent.  Finally he gets a clue, and still won’t cancel my account, but says he will transfer me to his supervisor.

Supervisor comes on, and the first thing he does is start to lecture me about my responsiblities to read the terms and conditions on a regular basis.

Do these people not have a fucking clue that by this time I am about ready to ream them hard for all this fucking “it’s your fault stupid customer” talk?

Anyway, after 10 minutes of explaining carefully how much this level of customer service isn’t serving me, the supervisor has the balls to say “I cannot close your account”.  Some dumbfuck arrogant rule that requires that the account closing request come by email from the email in the account – this even after they have identified me on the phone, used my pin number, and made other checks to assure who I am.  They are able to talk about my account with me, but not actually help me.

FUCK THEM ALL, I AM GONE!

If you have a party poker account, close it.  There are much better places to play, and they won’t fuck you over like these guys did to me.  FUCK THEM!

The first thing I notice is that since the increase in starting chips, the actual number of people left after an hour seems to have dropped.  I use to see about 50% of the people left after an hour, and now I am seeing more like 40% or even less.  It means that you have to pile chips a little faster because people are playing hard and screwing up massively.

It is interesting, if nothing else.

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I will say that over the last couple of weeks they seem to have finally sorted out the issues with their software.  The game play is a little better than it was, a little more smooth and all.  Plus I personally feel that there are a ton less bad beats out there and less rewarding of the people playing shit hands all over.  There is still some amazingly bad stuff out there, but bad players seem to get tripped up after a while, which is a good thing.

I have been playing a bunch of 6 player sit and go NLH.  They don’t pay as much to win (a $10+1 table pays 36 and 24, no third place) so the numbers are all a little different.   However, I think that they payback on these on average is a little bit better net, plus I find that the players are a little better, less people playing “go fish” with shit hands.

So I am on a money percentage of about 40%, which is what it needs to be.  So things are back on track that way.

Then their network crached like a fucking rock for most of the overnight period.  Once that sucker crashes, it is almost impossible to get things back going right.

Anyway, the next night I wandered back to play a game or two.   I am getting use to this higher chip count thing, although I could see a ton of players who don’t have a clue throwing way too many chips at really poor hands, thinking that 2000 chips somehow makes them richer than 800 chip for the same price did before.  Little do they realize that the ratios of chips to blinds is different at the earlier levels, so in fact you are somewhat poorer in the end to start with.  Anyway, these clowns are either rich with chips or flat as broke after a few hands.

While everyone I know says that the card selector / shuffling thing has not changed I will say that I have seen less and less major dog hands winning, and things  seem to be back to a more normal level.  It may be that the morons are still morons and the smarter players are not getting conned into staying in bad hands, but things just seem to be better.    Yes, I have won some tables and taken some tournament money in the last few days.

Anyway, I am keeping my eye on it all… we will see

I have been through a number of the bigger name places, and for various reasons, I have just not been very satisfied with them. In some cases, they will not accept the payment methods I normally use (and attempt to get me to signup for some off brand “payment system”). In other cases, I signup, play a couple of tables, and realize that the quality of the players is very, very low.

What do I mean by low quality players?

I mean the type of players who will stay in with a 64 suited, flop a single card from the same suit, and go all in. Heck, they have a hot hand, so why not, right? Well, at least one poker system I have seen appears to really reward massive dog hands, and these players flop the flush often enough to make it hard to play against. Basically, I lost any number of good hands to people who played total shit out of position and ended up pulling it out on the river.

Everyone can play a shit hand now and again, and every so often these hands do pan out. All of us (without exception) bluff our asses off at times, using the 72os as a hammer to steal the chips. But some of these players come in with consistantly horrible hands, raising small pairs, low suited connectors, and ANY face card. In a way you could call it agressive, but in the end it is stupid play that wouldn’t stand up in the real world. As I said, I get the feeling that some of these poker systems have their thumb on the scale a little bit, and fudge it to make those dog hands win to keep those players interested and excited.

This all became clear to me last weekend when I played poker with real people (during the superbowl party weekend thingie). These were not pros, not the best players in the world, but a nice mix of everyone from clueless amateurs to aggressive semi-pro type players. We played some two table, 15-20 player games, and in those the players who were too aggressive or called bad hands were blown out (and I was a couple of times). For the most part poorer players didn’t make it to the end, and the better players did well. I rarely saw a massive dog pull it out, and it was the exception rather than the rule.

That got me thinking about how the online games play out.

I have read up on how the random shuffle thing works (they use things like mouse movements and other weird random events to set random number generators in action). I have read classic poker books (like David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth’s seminal work on Texas Hold’em “Hold’em Poker for advanced players”) and I am pretty good at “in my head” math. Each and every card has a 1.9% chance of coming up in any position. After the flop, there is about a 5% chance than any single card will come up on the turn or river (2.5-2.6% , basically 1 in 45, because the only think you know for sure is that you have 2 cards, the other player has 2 card, and there are 3 cards up… so there is a 1 in 45 chance that any single card comes up). When you start doing the math on the chance that a dog hand turns into a winner (say like pulling runner runner to make a straight or coming up with one of the other 2 that will turn your ducks into a set) the numbers are fairly low, and the chance that those hands progress into something better is quite small. That multiple dog hands would progress to winners is even more unlikely. That a majority of dog hands would turn into winners is laughable.

When I see that, I am out of there.

Why does it happen? My theory on this is pretty simple. Poker rooms would lose players if the bad players kept losing all the time. The thrill of winning a big hand, going all in and winning, well, that is powerful incentive to keep playing. If you feel you are winning hands but losing tables, as a player you might think you are getting closer and that would be enough to encourage players to reload their accounts and keep playing.

I have noticed this more on smaller poker sites rather than the largest, which makes me think of the situation as marketting rather than absolutely random shuffles and deals. Try to keep the fish putting the money in the top, and the good players should be able to profit from it (but not all the time, because they keep getting bad beat by lucky beginners playing crap hands).

Anyway, I continue on my trek, there are a few more major sites to check out and then, well, I guess I will have to figure out where it is I really want to play.

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It is one of the smaller places. Primetime there was about 5000 players (party poker typically runs up to 70k players in prime time), and they had a number of “guaranteed minimum” tourneys that I could try.

So I tossed a buck in the account and went prowling to see how this place goes. First off, the tables filled up much slower. Not enough critical mass, you could wait 20 minutes to fill a single $50 sit and go. There are only about 500 tables total running, so you can see it isn’t all that busy. In playing 3 S&G tables, I saw people twice that I played against on the first table. Small, small world, I guess.

Anyway, I have never played with such a bunch of idiots in all my life. I lost my ass all over the place. These people were staying in and going all in with things like Q5os, and then making their two pair or set on the river and knocking out good hands. It was entirely, without a doubt, all about luck. In all the time I was there, I didn’t lose a single hand against a better hand, I always lost them against worst hands and players staying in for luck (best example, guy has 2 clubs in his hands, 47 or something… flop has a single club and two faces in it (I got the high pair out of the deal, with a decent kicker). This dumbass goes all in. I call him, and the turn and river are clubs… I am whacked by a guy who all in-ed a hand that needed runner runner and he got it (and someone had the nuts to type “NH”… dumbass!).

My only thought is that this system has the river screw you factor turned up to 11 to make sure that the morons keep winning.

Anyway, I won’t be going back there!

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Things started a couple of days ago, when I decided to play some of the $1+0 and $10+1 bigger tournaments. The $1+0 ones are truly interesting, as they certainly attract a very wide crowd of people (usually 2000+ players) and the skill levels go from decent to great to total clueless beeyaches. Let me tell you, it really seems to help my confidence and skill level when it comes to spotting the players and spotting the easy marks.

Anyway, I noticed that I was doing pretty good in these things. Routinely coming in the top 20% or so, and I made a slight bit of money ($3 or $4) in a couple of them for making it into the top 10%. During the same time I had been playing some $5 and $10 sit and go tables, and I was really doing well, probably 50% in the money and at least 25% wins. Not terrible, and keeping my bank reasonable and happy.

Well, I decided (quite randomly) to give a $50 tourney a shot. I hadn’t played anything over $20 since i started back, but I was sort of in a what the fuck kind of a mood and I decided to give it a shot. I was mostly interested because the number of players was reasonable, and as it turned out, the payouts went back almost to 10%, which is pretty decent.

Anyway, long story short, I made it into the money (solidly in, and then I blew it playing a hand I should have stepped away from) bringing me about $150 for my $50.

Kewl, I thought. Maybe just luck, whatever.

So today I pick up an afternoon $20 tourney. Bigger crowd (about 700). I played carefully, staying just about 10 times the blinds pretty much consistantly. I picked up a couple of good size pots… and the money number was 70. This game stayed on 71 players for about 15 hands in a row. Finally the dam broke and someone got knocked out. So I was in the money again. I finally made it up to about 45th, which paid me about 5 times what I put in the front end, which is fine by me.

Most importantly, I stated to get the feeling I was just a little bit better of a player today than I had been in the past. I really seem to have started down a more positive route for these tournament things (I am playing a $1+0 right now).

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Anyway, I have played a little bit over the last few days, and the results are mixed but encouraging. I played some sit and go tables (about broke even), and played a few lower dollar tourneys (I am landing about in the top 20% each time… ). I tend to be playing pretty good, concentration okay and everything, but over time I tend to lose the thread, lose control, and I start playing poorer and poorer hands, or playing good hands long past the time that they weren’t good anymore. That is what lands me out of the money most of the time.

I played my first rebuy / addon game as well. It was a cheapy ($5), and I was amazed at the number of people who didn’t addon at the end of the first hour. I figured that half the people should have less than the average number of chips, so each of them should be at least interested, plus some of the others as a matter of course. Yet in this case, not even 20% of the people took advantage from what I could see in the numbers.

So I will be back to play a little bit more, money is tightly controlled, so I am playing really money tables not subs or semis… at least not until I build up a little roll to work with.

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Party Poker has added Blackjack and sidebets to their sites. Basically, the blackjack is a pretty standard pay to play game. I have tried it a bit, and I lost there about as fast as I lose in vegas. Make some money, but overall it’s a fast way to lose.

They also added sidebets during the poker games. You can bet on “all red” “all black”… weird stuff.

What I wonder about, I guess, is that poker is a game of skill then luck. Blackjack and sidebets are a game of luck and then maybe some skill (although you can easily teach a bot to play blackjack, the rules are pretty simple and the “what to do” isn’t hard either). So is this moving away from game of skill and into game of chance?

Just a thought.

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One thing I have noticed is that NL hold’em has become the official passtime of just about everyone. It is truly insane. Much like smoking cuban cigars or wearing shirts with little logos on the left side, it has become fashionable beyond all get out. As a result, many of the poker places are filled with very average players who don’t have much of a clue how to play.

My warning for this week: If you are playing on a table with a buyin less than $25, assume that the other idiot has an ace. Most bad players will play A-anything. When an ace come sup and you only have a pair below that, it would be a good time to either fold or force. Some idiot stayed in with an ace, and you will get screwed every time by it.

It’s a sad fact, people without a clue often win… because they luck into it.

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Basically, Party Poker has some of the strongest advertising and brand recognition out there. It isn’t unusual for there to be more than 70,000 people online playing at any one time. The problem is PP tends to attract the newbs. Nothing wrong with being new, we all start somewhere. But the problem is the way these people play.

I played with one guy who buys into $10 sit and go, plays the first decent hand he gets all in, and then next decent hand all in, and goes on like that until he either wins or goes broke. NOTHING IN THE MIDDLE. All or nothing, every hand.

I have seen other people who will go all in with J4os – a crap hand, but these morons end up with a house or a flush or whatever and blow good players off (including me). Everyone of these idiots has watched too much TV and thinks they are the next Gus Hansen. The problem being they win just enough hands to think they are on to something, as opposed to just being on something.

Anyway, Empire Poker (which is a PP skin) is offering a $100 signup bonus, so I think I am going to head that way. A friend of mine has said he has done really well over there, the play is better and the guaranteed games often under subscribed, which means you are playing for more money than went into the pot.

If you are starting out to play poker, check out my links to poker tables. Play NICE… play reasonable, and take the time to truly learn the game and the odds that come with each action you take. At the end of the day, understanding your odds and chances will greatly improve your winnings in the long run, and keep you from being a hot or not player.

I have been running different styles. I have tried everything from the ultra conservative play on “group 1 or group 2″ hands all the way over to the Gus Hansen play every freaking card you get. I have had some successes and failures on both sides, and my account remains about even over the whole process.

I am doing reasonably well on the sit and go tables, depending on the style I use. You have to be very astute and spot the other types of players on your table quickly to assure that you don’t get caught out. You only have maybe 10 hands at the start to spot the players and get going. If the table as a whole is really tight, you can certainly take advantage of people early if you can spot it. If the table is a little wild, you can profit by staying out of the way.

One of my friends has been playing multitable sit and gos. He feels that they are a good hybrid between a tournament situation and a single table situation. He has done pretty well with them, his game play seems to be pretty much in line with what is needed in these tournaments.

I will talk more about that later.

I also want to say that I am disappointed by the number of truly horrible players out there that are kidding themselves into thinking they are the next Phil Ivy. Many of these people are truly clueless, but they do well enough because they hit some very lucky hands. In the end, these are probably the most dangerous people to play against, because they will stay in (and often raise) with little or nothing in their hands.

It truly makes me wonder!

Keep playing. It’s good!

I have noticed this: As I go up to more expensive tables (I am currently playing $20 and $30 sit and go stuff) I am seeing more and more GOOD players and people playing “properly”. Less people playing runner-runner hands, less people playing flush draws, and less people playing insane ace-anything hands. I still see some all-in play on middle pairs that sort of amazes me, but for the most part people at these levels play better and it really confirms to me something I see:

There are a number of online players who have done well in big tournaments, such as the PP million and others. I think these people do well because they play very differently from “properly” and they often seem to get a little luck on their side. They are not really looking at the return on a bet, pot size, position, or other. They are running on their gut and they seem to do pretty well with it.

However, I see these people also get blown out VERY HARD in many cases. Either they are winning huge or losing huge, few of them seen to be able to just play along and protect their stack. They are either building it up or losing it fast, not seeming to think very hard about it.

Remember, you cannot win with the first hand, but you can lose.

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I guess because the bet investment thing is lower or whatever, but these people are out there betting along to the limit, playing any two suited cards, hoping for a flush. Sadly, I guess the math on the subject is just good enough to keep them going.

I played last night, and the number of times people lost with trips to a flush draw that came on the river is INSANELY HIGH. My assumption is that in no limit, the player with the trips would have bet the other player out of the hand long before the river card came up, so I guess that is why you don’t see them very often.

Beware the flush draw… it’s proof that limit poker is a whole different game!

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Alex

While the details are just that, details, let me just say that I turned $20 into $100 within the 200 hands without issue, could have been up more but the table shrivelled down to 3 players, which is NOT good for retaining money.

It is truly amazing to see people come into these tables, plunk down $25, and play like total fools. Limit poker is really a much harder game than nolimit, as you cannot easily push people out of pots, and bluffs are way more subtle. I can still bluff people out, but the circumstances have to be exactly right, where as in NL you can just push out way more than the current pot to really make people think twice about playing.

Anyway, just want to say thanks to kikky and a few others that made those 200 hands way less painful than they could have been. I really don’t enjoy playing limit poker that much, but making some money at it is always a good think.

Play poker online come play online… maybe I will see you there!

I have come to the conclusion that unless you are playing truly big money tables, then Party Poker is NOT the place to play from about Friday noon until monday morning. The moron factor is high, and they are taking hands through sheer luck and nothing else.

I have also noticed the trend in tournaments on TV. Online players making the final table but not having a clue how to bet or how to read a bet. They are playing on balls, luck, and gumption, and often lack the basic skills. Thankfully, at the highest levels, they mostly get blown out.

Chip and a chair applies equally to morons, I guess.

Alex

I play a bunch of “sit-and-go” tournaments, which basically is one table, 10 people, playing with a top prize of about 50% of the money paid in. The blinds start small and increase every 10 hands. A typical s-a-g table lasts about 60-70 hands, maybe 45 minutes to an hour total. If you get into the top 3, you make money… it’s not terrible.

It is a good testing ground for ideas and theories to win bigger tournaments. You get to see 10 people go through all their paces, and depending on the type of table (read PRICE) that you play, you will see many different playing styles, from sharp as the pros to dumb as dogshit. I should point out that I feel sometimes I am both of those players… good as gold on some hands, stupider than a bag of hammers on others.

Anyway, back to the theory.

In the opening hands, everyone has the same number of chips. The blinds are small (about 2% of the stack), and the play is usually pretty free and easy. Nobody has a clue what anyone else is up to, and a such, people are playing a bit of whatever. This is doubly true when you have a couple of either ignornant or very loose players on the table, who bet up almost anything looking to “get a big pot”.

My theory is this: It is RARELY worth playing in these opening hands. First off, most hands are going to play to completition and cards will be shown. That means if you are called, you will have to show your cards. It is very easy for a better player (or one of those poker assistant things) to get a line on you when your cards are shown. More importantly, you are often playing for VERY few chips in the overall pictures at this point. Why do I say that? The table has 8000 chips on it (800 X 10 players). Winning a small pot (100 net chips or so) gets you only 1.25% of the total chips required to get to the end.

A note on pot sizes: I often discount or ignore the part of the pot that I put in as I could have retained it had I not gone in. A head to head pot of 1000 will almost certainly be made up of at least 40% your chips. Therefore, it is really a 600 net chip pot. Net pots are important because they represent your stack size gain overall. Many people are impressed by winning a huge pot (you have won 1185 chips!) – but really you went all in with your 800 chips into a pot that had 385 in it… you only netted 385… not 1185!

Anyway, at the end of it all, my theory of the day is similar to the techniques used in many sports: You cannot win in the first few minutes of a table, so why play like it? Take and play the really good hands that come your way, and otherwise wait it out until the table gets a little more short handed and the values on the pots become more significant. Otherwise you are showing yourself, your showing your skills and making your future play easier to predict.

Plus, as a bonus, it’s nice to be the unknown force later in the game

Alex

Seeing people UNPROMPTED moving all in with T6 offsuit just stuns me.

While it is true, any two cards can win (and every card technically has the same chance of coming up on the flop, turn or river) it isn’t true that all hands are created equal. Too many people get lucky a few times with strange hands, then they start to play those strange hands as normal.

The end is a train wreck.

You will lose a ton of money playing bad hands. Sometimes you will win, but most of the time you will get screwed.

Any two cards can win. Two better cards win more often.

Alex

As always, there are ups and downs in any learning experience. There are many very difficult concepts in this book (I read about half of it already) and some of those concepts are difficult to put into action without tons of experience. It is also, without a doubt, harder to play this sort of game on computer, mostly because you have no physical tells from the other players to work with. The good news is that if you get really good at reading JUST from bets, then actual real world play with give you even more stuff to work with.

Daniel Negreanu is one of the top players in poker today. While I have never met him, he is Canadian like me, and seems to have a genuine nice streak through him. He has a nice little blog… Daniel Negreanu’s blog it can be a little silly at times, but it can give you some good insite into the weird world of poker.

Have a good one!

Alex

First off, this weekend was one of the first times playing in a “more expensive” situation. Basically, I played a lower dollar sub-qualifier table, which I won handily, and that moved me on to a higher up table. That one then lead to a $300 per person deal.

Let me tell you, the cards are the same, but the players are MUCH better the further you go up. It’s amazing that these people are playing from the same situations that we play on lower tables.

Anyway, I have a book coming this week that will help me with the actual numbers of the game. I have been playing mostly by the seat of my pants plus some online learning, but I think that I can go a whole bunch better if I work on understanding the numbers and the odds. Apparently there is enough difference between one chair and the next as the deal button moves around to make some hands worth playing and some not.

On one of my amazon sites, I am going to set up a whole poker only area with books, videos, and more that have everything to do with poker. There is a bunch of stuff out there, but most of the stuff is pure junk or VERY simplistic.

I should warn you (and this is funny because this is on a website) be very careful what sort of information you take as true from online sources. I have seen a few sites that will remain nameless who suggest betting strategies most likely to drive you broke within minutes, making you an easy mark for more experienced players. Remember that many of these systems depend on a specific understanding a feel that maybe only the author has been able to master. Don’t take any one source as god on this issue!

Now, good luck and play poker!

I play at a number of places online you can try them by visiting poker online, you will find it interesting. These places have “free play” areas where you can try out the idea and see what you think, which is all good.

Online poker is easy to start, but it isn’t all that easy to make a ton of money. If you really want to do well, you should take some time to learn and study the game first. In a future post, I will put up a list of good poker books and training stuff that will really help you understand that games and do well.

Finally, remember that gambling is addictive and can be VERY bad for you. Don’t play to kill yourself. Set limits, play wisely, and most of all, enjoy yourself. When it isn’t fun, it is time to stop.

More in a while.

Alex