That’s pretty sweet. When I used to play a lot, I was always a “cash-gamer”. Never liked tournaments.
But now it seems like every chump who is taking up poker plays primarily in tournaments (TV coverage is the obvious suspect). Perhaps that’s a more profitable route nowadays?
Kudos on your big win, Beef. IMHO, that’s a nice roll to really get yourself going as a pro if that’s what you’re looking for. Hold onto it and let it smooth out the rough spots.
I thought I recognized the name. I’ve been playing online for about 14 months. I play Pokerstars exclusively. I started with stud, moved on to PL Hold’em, and “graduated” to NL Hold’em about 3 months ago (still playing 5/10). I now have about 1.2 M chips (basically doubled when I moved from PL to NL). I haven’t put any real money into yet, but it’s pretty tempting. Any advice on a service to use to make my first “donation”?
This happens in regular casinos too, there’s nothing shady about it. Props are far more common than shills these days (props get a salary from the casino but play with their own money). It’s not a scam to clean people of their money, but rather to start games and keep fading games going. The house pays the prop a salary but retains control of what table they sit at - so if they need to get a struggling game started they can send 2 or 3 props over to get the action going. There’s nothing unethical about this - the house doesn’t cheat in their favor or anything - they just pay players to be able to tell them what hours to play and where to sit.
New online sites use them because people don’t just join an empty site, there need to be games going, and sites will pay props (usually in the form of getting rake back in the case of online card rooms) to start games and attract more players.
I was the same way. I played tournaments when I was just beginning to learn because you got a lot of play for cheap, and it was good practice. Gave them up in favor of cash games. Only recently this week decided to try them out again. I won the first one I tried, $20 buy in, 180 players - small, but still hard to win any tournament. After that, of about 12 tournaments, I got 6th of 887 in a $10 rebuy, and won 4 (out of 6 entered) $22 rebuy satellite tournaments to a $530 event. Also of course I won that big tournament.
So this was my first week back to tournaments, and I did exceptionally well clearly. Tournaments require a different skill set than cash games, and although I prefer cash games, it would seem that I have better natural instincts for beating tournaments. I’ll be playing a combination of both from here on out… I’ve done pretty decently for myself on the $5/$10 NL cash games on stars.
I use firepay, and have had no problems with them. Neteller is more popular, and that was the first service I tried to sign up for - but I didn’t pass their identity check. My SS # didn’t match up with my name with whatever outsourced identity verification service they use. I was born out of the country so I assume it had something to do with being born elsewhere and assigned an SS # when I got here… but they wanted me to go get signed documents faxed from the social security office and instead I just signed up with firepay. Neteller has a few cool little features that firepay doesn’t, like a debit card from your neteller account…
Either service would be fine, anyway.