There’s definitely something about the green felt of Party that is good for me. I had another good night yesterday, really focusing on just one table and putting together a 38.5BB run. The cards were good to me, but mostly it was a good table. One hand we ended up with a flush board and the other 2 players in the pot decided to bet, the first led the bet and the other re-raised me and I capped. I was just lucky enough to have made my first straight flush online, the first player had 2 hearts, but at least the other guy had the ace (and I should be glad he didn’t check raise me on the turn). But, with 8$ profit on the last round of better alone, it was a good pot for me. Lucky definitely, but I was glad to get payed off.
The key to my night was to really focus on playing good poker and ignore the money. I’ve been focusing on turning out profit (multi-table, real basic poker) for the past month and it really hasn’t been working out for me. I have a hard time staying focused. But, I’m going back to the frame of mind that I had when I won my first big nights. I thought perhaps I had just been really lucky in my first month of play – and that still may be the case, and may have been again, last night – but I’m feeling that I just may be a decent poker player after all. Now, I just have to get the patience for better table selection. I know all my big wins have been due to good tables, so I’m going to have to get better at tracking them down.
I wasn’t focused completely on the Party table I was at, however. I was also haunting an ultra-low .25/.50 table at Choice, the only one with more than 1 person sitting at it at the time. Unfortunately, the two players there weren’t actually playing, so it was a long wait for any action. But, the Choice website said I’d unlock a dollar for every 5 raked hands I played and their rake structure takes something from pretty much every pot, so all I had to do was play 150 hands and I should get my bonus. And hopefully an opportunity to play in the $1000 freeroll on Sunday. I did eventually get some action and played a bit of heads-up and even ended up with 5 people at the table at one point, but it was very distracting having hands moving that quickly when I was trying to pay attention to my Party table where I was making some real money. Ok, for most readers, 30 bucks probably still isn’t ‘real’ money for a night’s work, but I’m going at this methodically and need to hit the 200BB mark to move up limits. I was down and then even, down then even, and even managed to get up a couple dollars, but I wanted to put in an even 100 hands and managed to piss away my $10 table stake in 10 minutes where I wasn’t paying much attention. That was a little frustrating in the face of a good evening otherwise, but after I confirmed with Choice support that all those hands counted, I’m 117 hands towards the $30 bonus, so I ended up making money on the evening. And according to The Poker Hermit and Grubby all it takes is 50 played hands (I imagine it is raked hands, but the site rakes pretty much every hand) to play in the Sunday $1000 freeroll. I’m already there, so I’m again talking with Choice support to work things out. Support there seems decent, as I got a response within 12 hours about my bonus, but they forgot to address my question about the freeroll.
I noticed an email yesterday talking about some patch for Poker Tracker. Something about Advanced Note Exports. Curious, I started playing with it a bit last night and I have to say it is going to save me a ton of time! I’ve been going through Poker Tracker recently trying to formulate some useful notes based on player performance, but I’ve seen so many players (1800 at this point) that it is a very time-consuming process. And some of the effort is wasted as I’m sure there are many of those players I will never encounter again. Tracker can now automate that process for you, allowing you to export a whole slew of stats (from last date seen to BB/100 to how often they raise pre-flop). Now instead of trying to go over these stats and provide a summary for 1800 players I may never see again, I can export some of the most important stats, and interpret them only for players I actually share a table with. What a huge time saver! And you can set up various criteria for which players have their stats exported as well, so you won’t have stats for players who’ve only played 2 hands. Now I just have to figure out which stats I want to see…
Oh, just got the reply from Choice customer support and I’m now registered for the freeroll on Sunday. This is a very good deal folks. If you deposit from Neteller, you get a 20% bonus up to $100 and it only takes 5 raked hands per dollar to unlock (and I unlocked most of mine playing heads-up .25/.50) . And if you manage 50 hands before tomorrow, you can play in the $1000 freeroll, which still has pretty low attendance according to The Poker Hermit and Grubby. The only problem is that the site is the ghost town, but you should be able to find a few bodies to unlock your bonus against if you haunt a table while playing elsewhere. I’ll probably be around a bit more later today looking to unlock the rest of my bonus, so keep an eye out for tpfelt.
EDIT: Oops, I attributed the Choice advice to minorthird instead of The Poker Hermit as I should have. My apologies Hermit. I had been thinking minorthird because I have been waiting to see if he manages to put together the full list of finishes from the WBT II. At least I had the link right.