Another day another dollar

As I woke up this morning dawn was preparing to break. I took a look out of the spare bedroom window and spotted the potential for a "nice" dawn. I've been waiting for one of these on a Sunday for ages. So, I grabbed the camera, legged it up to the heath, and took a couple of pictures. Not as nice as I had hoped, but still quite pretty.



Currently looking at the Party waiting list and there only appear to be 4000 players. What happened? A Server failure? I see that the higher stakes games are now available on the skins, so one has to expect more defections to the rake-back offering sites.

Party really have to do something about this. Either they stop the deals with their skins (which would probably result in some massive legal bills), or they start offering rakebacks. The latter probably would cost them less than they think, since a large number of regular players would stop playing on the skins and return to the Party mainframe. I guess that they are scared of starting what might be perceived as a price war.

+++

My hatred of tournaments continues apace. I have now cashed once (4th out of 44) in 26 tourneys. I suppose that, if I played in as many tournaments as I play in cash games, this would only be equal to a single bad week. I'm not even losing coin flips (I could probably handle that). I just seem to be utterly cold-decked. I'm beaten when I go all-in.

A typical tourney today. Play tight for the first four levels. Outplay opponents on the flop (usually from the blinds), to keep my head above water. Get up to 2200. Continue in this getting-no-cards vein, stealing blinds here and there, until my 350 chip raise with 95 off (blinds 50-100) is reraised a mere 102 chips all-in by the button. I have to call here (I'm getting 10-to-1) and reveal my rags. That destroys any stealing opportunities until the table breaks. Needless to say my 95, surely favourite against KJs, fails to win.

Surviving to level 7 (blinds 150/300) I'm shittled down to 1650 chips. A player with 5000 chips raises to 900 in MP2. I have A8s in the Big blind. Do I reraise all in?

Of course not. I know opponent cannot pass the reraise. So I make the technically correct play and flat call. The flop comes QJx rainbow. I bet the rest of my stack and he thinks for all of a nano-second before calling with AQ. See what I mean?

I'm playing exactly the same way as I played when I was on a run of cashing one in three. That's how tournaments work, and that's why I don't like them. Hell, if I had 25 losing sessions out of 26 at cash, I think I would step out of a window.

How many "lucky" players are out there who have a big positive figure against their name in tournies, solely because they have been lucky? I'm not saying that they are useless -- merely that they are probably only a little bit better than average. If the long run is longer than you think in cash, how much longer must that run be in tournaments? I have certainly seem some tournament players in big tournaments whom I consider to be seriously average, but who always seem to get that one lucky hand at exactly the right moment.

I could adopt different tactics, I suppose. The agressive play early on looking for a double-up, followed by the big raise pressure plays. The trouble is, while my current strategy is not working for me at the moment, the "early double-up" strategy hasn't worked for me ever. Even if the double-up succeeds, I just don't have the "nose" for how to pressurize with the big stack. I end up losing it all back.

The Party's over

Well,just as I am writing about what Party needs to do, it appears that they have gone and done it. The reason Empire only had 4000 players on it this morning was because Party has split from all of its skins.

To say that there are tears aplenty is the understatement of the year. Just as I open a rakeback account (well, a couple of weeks ago), the whole thing goes tits up!

And, of course, the skins have been hit by withdrawals on an unprecedented scale. It's a run on the bank, boys!

The sheer, unparalleled mendacity of it all is, I suppose, unsurprising. A lot of the rock multi-tablers who basically depended on rakeback will disappear. The VERY good players will move back to Party, because the rakeback was less of a proportion of their winnings.

But how it will all pan out, god only knows. This clearly smells of a panic move by Party. Whether it will be the answer that they think it will be (a return of the departed flock) is hard to tell. My gues is that for Party the move will be revenue-neutral, but it will eliminate a lot of the rock multi-tablers on the Party tables (since they were accessing it via skins).

But, let's face it, Party are scumbags, utter scumbags, the lowest of the lowest of the low. Any street cred that they had (which wasn't much) has utterly vanished.

The winners from all this will be Ultimate, Paradise and Pokerstars (and Prima, I guess). I can just about carry on at Empire at 3-6 and 5-10. No fish (well, not so many) but a lot of multi-tabler rakebackers playing weak-tight. These are a steady source of income.

I'm not sure if I am upset that I missed the rakeback party or not. On the one hand, it's just my luck, but on the other, it wasn't something I got accustomed to.