paradise bonus
I deposited $100 with Paradise, and took advantage of their "referral bonus" to put $50 in my bonus account, and $50 in my uncle’s.
Paradise gives you one point for paying a dollar towards a tournament fee, or one point for every raked hand (raked meaning raked more than .25, so a pot of more than $5 in NL, which happens fairly frequently at the $25 table with .10/.25 blinds). After you get 100 points, you get $10 of your bonus. Repeat.
Obviously, someone could pick up 20-40 points an hour playing cash games, and 1-2/hr in tournaments. Cash games it was, then.
I cleared the bonus today, so it’s time to look at stats. I won $50 over 1,373 hands. My $25 NL rate was 2.26BB/100, but my $10NL rate was 33. That’s obviously not a big enough sample size to guarantee anything, but the flop percentages were attractive: you can almost always find a table over 30% at these limits, and frequently over 40. (At Empire now I can’t get anything above 20%. They must be folding pocket kings.)
Possibly important side note: I lost a buy-in yesterday at $25 NL, when I held AA vs. QQ, and we got all-in preflop. The flop was KJ9, all clubs, and I held the Ace of clubs. This is a hair’s breadth from drawing dead: one of the two remaining queens was a club that would give me the nut flush. The turn was another Ace: a queen on the river would only give my opponent second-best set. The river, though, was one of the three non-club Tens in the deck, completing a soul-crushing, faith-robbing straight against all odds. Of course, once two people are all-in on Paradise, they just push all the cards out and hand the money to the winner, so it was a lot less dramatic. But the point: if I hadn’t angered the poker gods somehow, I’d have won that $25 instead of losing it, and I’d be up $100 instead of $50.
Which is not to say I didn’t try tournaments. I have a philisophical problem playing $5+1s (20% rakes are for live poker in casinos), and with my bankroll, I could only play $10+1s when I was feeling extra flush with cash, but that ends up not being a huge problem: I hit second place once, and out of the money six times. Heads-up, I went 14-12, just barely enough to eek past the rake.
I cash out, then, up twenty-five cents, if you don’t count my bonus. The plan for now is to take the original hundred out of Paradise, return it to Stars, and go back to small SnGs. The money that’s left at Paradise should just live on the small NL tables: they’ve been extremely loose and generous, and I hope to milk them for a long time.