Never ever

Ahhh here we are, a week or 12 days or whatever it is later. How did my free $20 on Party Poker work out? Actually, pretty well. I was able to turn it into around $90 by playing in a few tournaments. Since we were in need of some cash, and the minimum you can request to cash out is $50 AND the $20 bankroll was still "in play" and could not be removed, I took out all but $35 - that being the entry fees for 3 tournaments. I figured, if I could not get anything in those 3 tournaments, then no big deal. It was reasonably tough to win with my free $20 but for the most part things seemed pretty normal, unlike last time I played with real money on Party Poker. However, after I cashed out, the story changed - again. Just as it had the first time I took something OUT of Party Poker, it was like I was "switched" into a negative mode. I was repeatedly taking bad beats, players playing 50 to 1 long shots were getting me over and over again. At first I thought, you know, this is typical of Party Poker and was not upset particularly. I really figured the $20 I got was never going to get out of there anyway once I took anything from it. I played the same poker, the same varying strategies, the same calculated plays and was beaten by worse hands over and over and over. And I don't mean I had AA cracked by KK. I mean, I had AA about 6 times since cashing out - and lost with it EVERY TIME. And that's just AA, that doesn't count how many times I was beaten with a high pair (KK,QQ) with someone else playing complete garbage like 7 - 2. It isn't "Negative Variance" when it is like someone throws a switch. The only pots I was able to win were the ones where I outplayed the other person. If I went all in, I got cracked with a premium hand. If I slow played, I got cracked with a premium hand. If I set a trap, the one hand that could beat me would beat me at the showdown. Hell, in one game I had what amounted to a 99.5% chance of winning a hand AND IT GOT CRACKED. Let me warn you of one thing - if you want to play poker for money seriously (in other words to actually hope to win), do not, ever, under ANY circumstances play on Party Poker. There is something seriously fishy going on with that site and I don't mean that in a good easy-money fish kind of way. I mean that the random number generator does not appear to be random. The more I see the more I suspect they have written some kind of poker software that intentionally pits closely-matched hands against one another to generate action. I have heard people say "but why would they do that", hell I have even struggled with the question myself but I think I have to now believe they do rig the games. By making money fly around and making it tough for the strong players, they keep the poor players sucked in. By keeping poor players artificially lucky, they increase the bets and therefore they increase the rakes they take. By frustrating the strong players in tournaments, they make sure that the tournament ends faster by preventing really strong players from making up a final table that could last several hours. It really smells bad over there. I am just glad that my total from Party Poker is actually in the black - I am up a total of about $30-40 all told after playing there. DO NOT make the mistake of thinking that you can do a lot better, at least not in the lower dollar value games. Who knows, maybe in the games with high stakes they don't fuck around but I will never know because I will NEVER take the risk with my own money there again. I might play Freerolls for practice from now on, but if I ever get $50 in winnings or more it will come out right away. After my 3 sit-n-go fees got sucked out on, I used the few dollars I had left to enter some of the big $1 entry fee tournaments. Even in those, I was repeatedly hammered by bad beats over and over. In two of them I was able to get into the top 200 players which meant I recovered my entry fee plus a few cents and that allowed me to try a half a dozen of those tournaments until I finally got fed up. I used up all my Party Poker points to enter a couple of other events as well and the same crap continued. It's like they were just trying to get me to make a deposit again to "feed the addiction" I must have since I keep playing. Ha! Fat chance. Poker IS gambling. There are always risks. However, strong players should be able to minimize risk and maximize skill. I don't pretend I am the next WSOP main event champ, but I am not a bad player. On other sites, I am not seeing the kind of bullshit that goes on at Party Poker. Granted, PP has the largest number of players so there are that many more people to complain, but the complaints at poker not only consist of the typical complaints about online poker but very specific descriptions of things like the nearly instant "negative variance" that occurs as soon as you make a withdrawl or demonstrate an ability to win a little too much. The fact that a premium hand always seems to come up against another premium hand just smells of something planned, not random events. I'm not an idiot. I have taken my free bankroll on Titan Poker, and after going up and down and up and down hovering around the starting amount I have managed to slowly grind out a profit. At one point on Titan Poker I DID have a "negative variance" streak (it was also a period where I was sick with the flu and very much off my game) and was down to the very last $4 of that free startup fund I got, but I have since multiplied that more than 20 fold. Maybe tomorrow I will have another bad streak - I have had a couple, but it is to be expected. I've never felt like something was inherently wrong with the way hands played out on Titan, however. Coin flips pairs vs overcards are coin flips, a truly dominant hand usually wins at about the correct rate of probability and betting following pot odds actually is not suicidal like it seems to be on Party Poker. I know I have a lot to learn still. I know I have so much more I want to read. I am in the black for playing poker online so far, but not in a way that if I was not already disabled and at home playing from bed that would make it worth playing. It is hardly "quit your job and make a living playing poker" rate of winning but for the $30 odd dollars in my own money that has gone in I have about 5 times that amount that I have won. Poker saved our butts last week because I needed $40 to make sure our bank account didn't go into overdraft and I was able to win it without risking any of our own money. Whatever the case may be in terms of how MUCH I make, it is actually kind of fun, and unlike other online games I have played over the years I am actually getting a small financial benefit out of it. That is, its fun except when playing on Party Poker. In case you didn't get it before, don't play there. Unless you really really want to try it out - then let me refer you so we both can get a little bonus and I can try and get more free cash out of them.

Whoo-wheee

Wow. Its been a while. Suffice to say, I got horribly discouraged after the tilt incident with Party Poker. I basically lost all of my "profits" and actually was down about $20 from my original deposit when I decided I needed to stop. Party Poker, it seems, is a bit strange. And rather suspicious. I can't say I have played millions of hands of poker but certainly by now it is in the thousands, and when I play on Party Poker there is a funny smell in the numbers. Hands like flushes should be relatively rare - that's why they are ranked 4th in the available hands. Only a full house, four of a kind or a straight flush can beat a flush because only those hands are rarer. In the last few days, I have literally seen dozens of flushes in approximately a thousand hands played. The math says there should have been only a little over a handful. There are also a lot of "power hands" head to head coming up, creating showdowns. If someone has pocket aces, they should win most of the time - but they are often drawn out by sets and the like. That should happen a few times, sure, but the aces should win, mathematically, MOST of the time. Not on Party Poker. To make a long story short - I quit Party Poker. Just cashed out my money and left. It was driving me crazy. I was getting nailed by bad beats constantly. Take a few, sure, but when every tourney you are in you are turfed when you have the best start hand, again and again? It wasn't for me. Thing is, as I studied more I read a lot of stuff online and found out an important fact - if you play ADVANCED strategy against the truly BAD players, you will get killed until you adjust. They just don't "get it" when you bet after something hard that it is not sensible to keeping chasing a draw. When someone busts your Aces full of Kings on the flop with runner runner deuces to make 4 of a kind after you went all in - you are playing some seriously bad players. I was really trying to play too smart for my own good at Party Poker. So, I took some time off and studied more poker, and I got a free bankroll from Titan Poker. Started with $50 which I can't cash out but I can play with as I choose. Trouble is, Titan Poker is very quiet. On Party Poker you can barely get into a Sit'N'Go tourney - on Titan you have to wait and wait and wait sometimes. I quickly turned my $50 bankroll into $40 and then floated at that level. It seemed I could play endlessly winning enough to cover my fees but never going above the first $50 until I hit D-Day. What was D-Day? D-Day was the day I was down to my last $7 after winning NOTHING something like 6 times in a row. I was just getting HAMMERED all over the place, although playing technically good poker. I was making few mistakes but the cards were killing me - the Poker Gods were apparently trying to teach me a lesson. So, I took $5.50 of my last $7 and entered another tourney. I played virtually the same game - and won. So, then I went in a $2+fee tourney and finished second. The next day I went in and finished in the money in another $5+ tourney and I had most of my bankroll back, where it is hovering right now. However, I didn't play on Titan Poker again in the following week because I got an interesting email proposition. From Party Poker. They gave me $20 to come back and play again. So... I figured I would go over there and give them back their money. This story has one of those things we are seeing a lot on TV right now - end of the season... TO BE CONTINUED.