Points win prizes

[peterbirks]

There appears to be a bit of a price war going on in the poker world at the moment. Bonus cash on Pacific is accumulating far faster than it used to, and now Party Poker is using the previously outlawed term "rakeback".

In fact, the new Party scheme looks to be a rakeback dream. But this has its downside, that being; look what happened to the I-Poker network.

It would be soooo great if Part could stay as it is today with the new points scheme. But I know that it just won't happen. The shitbag 10%/9% short-stack multi-tablers will appear (may they all die horrible deaths). These players are beatable because they have to play ABC style (indeed, many on I-Poker are bots), but to beat them you have to "slightly out-bot them". It's tedious and marginal. very soon, the games become unplayable if you are a relaxed full-stack kind of player, and you go elsewhere. That leaves people like me facing fewer desirable opponents and many more undesirable opponents.

Luckily it can take up to six months for this to have its full impact, and I sincerely hope that it won't happen. But I'm not optimistic.

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Went all way to Richard herring last night and it was sold out! Stupid of me because I could have reserved tickets online quite easily.

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One of the most solid weeks of poker in the past year. No net win per day of more than $90 and no net loss greater than $60.

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Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I asked you this before; I'm curious to know whether the latest bonus program revisions have made you change your answer. (Probably not all that much, but if I knew then I wouldn't be asking...)

To what extent does bonus program availability affect your decision as to where to play (or, perhaps, where to concentrate your play) and to what extent is it better value for you just to chase the games with the juiciest opponents, on whichever sites they may be providing the sites haven't annoyed you too much with regard to unusually horrible customer service or an unusually annoying user interface?

Unrelatedly, should every online poker site eventually become flooded with bots, do you think this would drive real players offline and into live FTF action, or is the other natural evolution that people start to play only against people they (to some extent) know and trust?

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Empirically, whenever I have I gone for a bonus for the sake of a bonus, it appears to have been a bad move. However, this might be selective memory at work. Certainly there was one bonus I cleared at $3-$6 Limit on Empire where I also won a lot at the tables.

But if you find juicy opponents, they will always be worth more than a bonus. However, that does not lead to the conclusion that you should seek juicy opponents rather than bonuses. To extend the Taleb black swan line, if a black swan is worth a million quid, while a white swan was worth a tenner, should you spend your entire life looking for a black swan?

In addition, since, when looking for white swans, you might find a black swan anyway, then the only thing to work out is how much rarer the juicy opponents are when you are playing specifically for a rakeback/bonus offer.

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If online poker becomes so bot-infested or faux-bot multi-tabling nit infested, and the "social" players all leave, they won't "return" to live play, because most of them didn't play live anyway. Some will, but most will leave the game.

But there's a whole self-balancing process at work here, and that means that the winning player will always find somewhere that he can win, or he will quit the field. Online poker may eventually shrink back in size significantly, but, since it can't be truly "solved" in the multi-player format, the thinking player just has to ensure that his profit margin exceeds the rake he pays.

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[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Unrelatedly again, I am always amused to see the variety of indicators of value "above gold" that people use, whether it's for reward schemes (perhaps poker sites, perhaps frequent flyer programs) or for credit cards. Bronze, silver and gold are all standard. Diamond and platinum are common enough. Palladium is a new one on me; I know nothing about it, other than I've seen it listed on a few commodities charts as, indeed, having a price above that of gold. What next? Titanium? Osmium? Uranium? Plutonium?

[poolcuepoker.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

I have to agree about Ipoker.I start off a 25/50 table and find I am the big stack with $20.
It's their points system that does this.If I ss 3 tables I get more points than full stacking one.So what do I do when I need a certain amount of points for a bonus?

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I might be imagining it, but I actually got the feeling that there were already more shortstackers on Party today than there were this time last week. If my perception is accurate, that would be a frighteningly fast development. Of course, one knows how "co-operative" the Germans are when it comes to things like this, so I guess the German 2+2 forum has been red hot on how good the new Party system is for short-stackers.

Thankfully, most of them just aren't very good. Then again, perhaps at $200 BI they don't need to be, because so few of the full-stackers seem to know the right counterplays.

I was working out the required hand-throughput that I would like to make to generrate some good guaranteed income on three sites (Stars, Party, Pacific). It's rather high. That's because the sites set the "good" reward levels at such a point that they imagine they will be getting nearly 100% of a player's playing time. That means I have to play close to 300% of their "expected" 100% allocation if I'm to get reasonable benefits from three sites.

Why not play just one site? Because, unlike short-stack Germans, my boredom threshold is not infinitely high.

PJ