Sunday, April 30, 2006

Dirty Socks

When it comes to Poker, I am not superstitious. There is nothing controlling the distribution of cards other than the dealer and the cut. Online, I believe in the RNGs. Nobody is out there trying to make sure I win or lose. I am not that important. Of course, I don't change socks if I have a big night. Or my shirt and pants. Or underwear. I do sleep on the couch a lot it seems.

When do you give up on a site? I recall starting playing online at UB. I lost a bunch of money because I was awful. A succession of sites ensued as I floundered around in different games and limits but still losing my ass. I up at Party and settled in for probably 75% of the time. Trying to bonus chase and acting on the advice of others, I still played other sites, mostly continuing the ass loss. Bonus chasing has rarely worked for me. I end up playing too high for my deposit, trying to make the bonus in a night. Variance is not your friend when you are underfunded. And anyway, Party was going so nice. At the end of January 2006, I was sure that Party was going to provide me with a nice second income this year. I was killing the SNGs after moving from the $11s to the $55s over the last year. Regular withdrawals were being used to fund WPBT events at other sites and to continue the futile bonus search.

Well, Party screwed me in February by changing the format of all of its tourneys. My ROI dropped lower and lower until I finally hit my first extended streak in the red. The change in stack sizes and blind levels threw me for such a loop, I stayed dizzy until I finally decided to take a break. It's not bad luck, just bad adaptation on my part.

Now, I loved the MTTs at Party and had a pretty nice 2005 playing those. After giving away my stack on the SNGs though, I wanted to make a clean break from the site for a while, and I have. It has been almost a month since I hit Party. Oh, I'll be back, but the time away has done me well.

Most of my time has been spent at two of the smaller sites. The SNGs have awful structures but I seem to have figured them out enough to profit. The MTTs are small enough that I don't have to invest six hours for a small (as a ratio to buyin) payoff if I make it into the money but can't hit the top five. If I do hit the top spots, the payouts are nice and it only took two to three hours to get there. Right now, time is a premium. That's why the month of April was bone dry here on the BP blog. There is plenty to write about, but the time is short. Best of all, I haven't changed my socks too much lately.

2 comments:

Hammer Player a.k.a Hoyazo said...

I'm so with you on cutting particular sites off at times. I have completely sworn off UB, as I cannot stand the user interface, and frankly I can't believe some of the recockulous beats I have taken on that site (mostly in heads-up matches with Veneno, naturally). Otherwise, if one site overscrews me too bad, I will often just stop using them for a few weeks, and I've even been known to withdraw all my money from said site. You know, just to put the fear of god into them while I ponder my return.

Nice post, good luck with these smaller sites' sngs.

Joe Speaker said...

I stopped playing at Party about a year ago (with few exceptions since). It was partly because I was taking a (bad) beating, partly because the chat box was filled with idiotic vitriol ALL the time and partly because I'd started playing mostly tourneys and the structure was (way) better elsewhere.

Interestingly enough, I got a free $75 from them a couple weeks ago and played a couple SnGs on it (no way I'm gonna grind out 750 raked hands with only $75 in my account) for fun. The new SnG structure? Couldn't get a handle on it. Not in that short amount of time. So it didn't really eliminate the bad taste in my mouth about that site, even if it does mean I'm deeply and profoundly retarded.