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.
posted by PolarBear @ 5/29/2006 12:00:00 AM
1 Comments:
Polarbear - i continiously experience the same thing, and it is on Titan and Ladbrokes mainly. A very distinct pattern: play every night for abt 2-3 hours on 0.25/0.50 tables, winning between 5 and 150 every night. Hands do then seem to seem to win at their expected rate, i.e., AA pre-flop all-ins abt 80% of times etc. My strategy is to cash out every day to leave just enough to play on tables the next day. Now, after about a week of play i ran into a couple of really bad nights. AA suddenly switches to 20% winners, sets get busted in the majority of times, and i tend to be dealt very nice second best hand, such AQAQ vs a lower set. Or, my draws never seem to hit, despite 10-15 tries with 8 outs or more. On those nights the cards defies logic. And it is not that single impossible bad beat, rather losing 70% favourites 8-10 times in a row. Yday is a good example; lost 6 sets in a row, 2 rivered by a higher pocket pair (2 outs), 1 gut shot (4 outs), and the rest str8 or flush draws. Remember, we are not talking about bad beats technically, but a streak of cards that has a likelihood of occurring below 0.1%. The usual response to this complaint is 'you probably don't rememeber when cards go your way'. Well, i rarely call an all-in in need of a lucky card unless when warranted so i do not really have much statistics on this. What really raises suspicion is that the swings are too systematic to make sense. It is never the case of being one good hand one bad hand, or one good day, one bad day, but one good week and one bad week. True variance implies that a bad beat is as likely after a good beat and vice versa, they should not systematically come in chunks. The '1's below indicate good beats and '0' bad beats, and the series look something like this for me, and it has since i started playing 2 years ago, each number for one day; 111111100000011111100000011111100001111111000000 etc etc. We really should expect something like 10011011100101010011010001110111001011. Now, just to sum it up, i have always laughed at these stories about rigged tables, or prepared decks according to Polarbears, but i am getting more and more doubtful. Negative and positive variance does happen, i am fully aware of that, but on these sites it comes in a pattern that is very difficult to explain over the longer run. However, before making any conclusions please think about these stories and see of it compares with yours. For a long time i have been keeping track of my sessions, and the streaks described above is representative of what i am continously experiencing.
Thanks!
NN
Post a Comment
<< Home