I flopped the nuts!

Sick of the 800 chips Party gives you in a SnG (and the blinds bouncing up every 10 hands), I decided to give one of their $10 MTTs a try.  It was fun.

You know how on PokerStars, when people get close to the money, they tighten up, and it seems like nothing’s going to happen to the standings until you’re blinded out?  Some sites play hand-for-hand to make sure nobody stalls at each level, but since Party doesn’t have that kind of thing in place, I figured there’d be some goofy tight play.

No way!  It seemed like people weren’t changing their play at all as we got close to money time.  Players just continued to file out in a steady stream, both at the money cutoff and as levels went up.  I think it was at 82 people left that someone at my table was facing a deciding all-in.  80th place paid about four dollars more than 81st, so you might even use your time bank to see if 81 would die off… it’s sneaky, but legal.  This player stalled, and 81 left.  And then 80.  And then that player disconnected: s/he wasn’t even playing tactically!  Hilarious.

I finished somewhere in the top 50 of 2000.  That paid something like $65: great, until you consider that I was up at midnight on Sunday, playing for almost four hours. 

That’s only one experience, but if you hate Party or are wondering where the crazy money’s at, it would seem that you could do worse than the evening MTTs.  Just not the SnGs: those are basically coinflips.

I focused my game in July, playing nothing but $5 SnGs for a long time.  It worked.  I hit the money in an obscene percentage in the first half of the month, and cooled off a little bit, but still showed a $100 profit after 50+ tournaments.  A few MTTs for large prizes didn’t pay off, but that’s no big deal.

I also started playing .05/.10 NL on PokerStars… that wasn’t quite as sensational, but the profit was still there.  I am always reloading when take a hit, so it’s hour after hour of super-tight play… gets a little boring after a while, but you can’t do much else.  I don’t know enough to get away from ace-junk when I end up playing it, so I am better off waiting for premium hands.

Having proven that I could crush the $5 SnGs, I was really eager to try the $10, but a friend advised me to wait until I’d built up at least $300 in my bankroll.  That was wise: you’ll read in my August recap what happened as soon as I "graduated". 

That’s more or less what I want to see happen in August: hit the $10 tournaments, see about the same success rate (or a little less), and keep building.  Maybe cash a bonus or two.

I’m getting less squeamish about Party ring games.

I finally got an actual Party account opened, and deposited to get that initial deposit bonus.  I had about a hundred hands to play to clear the bonus, and I was up about $30 already.  In that last hundred hands, though, I couldn’t catch cards at all, and the prospect of a free $35 was making me a little impatient.  I called an all-in with AJo (I was outkicked, but had flush outs that, technically, made it a correct call), and then not half and hour later tried some silly, silly move against an opponent who I’d decided was playing too loose.  So I lost $40 to scoop the $35 bonus.

And I was already down overall, since I’d been playing the Party $10+1s, which are still coinflip city.  Ah well.