So Much for Rakeback - October 12, 2005
This past weekend caused quite a stir in the poker world. I explained rakeback in a previous post. I was anticipating collecting between $200-$400 a year in rakeback simply by playing the same games I was playing before only on Empire Poker. For those of you who don't know Party Poker was a main site that was interconnected with a few other sites. Empire Poker is one. So if I was playing at Empire Poker I was connected to the Party network and playing against players from Party. That all changed this weekend.
Party Poker decided to go solo and dropped the other affiliates from their network. So now you have Party Poker and then the "Empire Network". I can still receive rakeback but I have to be playing at Empire. The problem is that Party Poker accounted for nearly 90% of the players in the party network. Usually new signups and people who are oblivous to rakeback and not as good of players will sign up with Party Poker. The people at the affiliates are those that are aware of rakeback and most likely better players. So now my decision...Do I play at Empire against better players but with less rake or do I pay the higher rake and play at Party Poker against the worse players?
The only benefit of this is that with the huge change nearly every poker site (Empire, Party, Poker Stars, and I'm sure UltimateBet, etc) are offering lucrative deposit bonuses. So I put some money into PartyPoker last night so I could get a $100 free after playing a certain amount of hands. At party the amount of raked hands that you need to play is equal to seven times the amount of your bonus. I will collect a free $100 if I play 700 raked hands in the next seven days. Not an easy task, but not that difficult either. You don't have to play high stakes. So I sat down at the 0.50/1.00 Limit Hold Em table and played four tables at once. I had PokerTracker and Gametime + going so I did notice that after 50 hands from everyone there were at least a couple people at the table that played over 50% of their hands. It seemed a bit higher than at Empire. My session ended after about an hour and I was pretty tired. Tough to manage 4 tables at once. Although I don't think my play decreased much if at all. I ended up losing $15 in the session but I played well. Didn't feel like I won any huge pots and had some bad beats go against me.
Been playing pretty well lately. Not great, but I'm trying to get accustomed to playing limit poker. I have gathered about 2000 hands so I can begin to look at my tendencies in poker tracker. I am going to start reading up on the best way to analyze the data so I can critically look at my play and what I need to change. However, I think the best aspect of Poker Tracker is the ability to keep data on your opponents. As I build my database I will be able to see that the player on my left plays x% of the hands, raises preflop y% of the time, has an aggression factor after the flop of z and for the number of times they see a flop, they will go to the river k times. Plus, based on these stats I can setup characters for these players. For example, if someone is a calling station, gametime + will show a telephone by their name, so I will know to make a value bet on the river even if my hand isn't the nuts. Now, I just need to know how to play against the other styles.
Party Poker decided to go solo and dropped the other affiliates from their network. So now you have Party Poker and then the "Empire Network". I can still receive rakeback but I have to be playing at Empire. The problem is that Party Poker accounted for nearly 90% of the players in the party network. Usually new signups and people who are oblivous to rakeback and not as good of players will sign up with Party Poker. The people at the affiliates are those that are aware of rakeback and most likely better players. So now my decision...Do I play at Empire against better players but with less rake or do I pay the higher rake and play at Party Poker against the worse players?
The only benefit of this is that with the huge change nearly every poker site (Empire, Party, Poker Stars, and I'm sure UltimateBet, etc) are offering lucrative deposit bonuses. So I put some money into PartyPoker last night so I could get a $100 free after playing a certain amount of hands. At party the amount of raked hands that you need to play is equal to seven times the amount of your bonus. I will collect a free $100 if I play 700 raked hands in the next seven days. Not an easy task, but not that difficult either. You don't have to play high stakes. So I sat down at the 0.50/1.00 Limit Hold Em table and played four tables at once. I had PokerTracker and Gametime + going so I did notice that after 50 hands from everyone there were at least a couple people at the table that played over 50% of their hands. It seemed a bit higher than at Empire. My session ended after about an hour and I was pretty tired. Tough to manage 4 tables at once. Although I don't think my play decreased much if at all. I ended up losing $15 in the session but I played well. Didn't feel like I won any huge pots and had some bad beats go against me.
Been playing pretty well lately. Not great, but I'm trying to get accustomed to playing limit poker. I have gathered about 2000 hands so I can begin to look at my tendencies in poker tracker. I am going to start reading up on the best way to analyze the data so I can critically look at my play and what I need to change. However, I think the best aspect of Poker Tracker is the ability to keep data on your opponents. As I build my database I will be able to see that the player on my left plays x% of the hands, raises preflop y% of the time, has an aggression factor after the flop of z and for the number of times they see a flop, they will go to the river k times. Plus, based on these stats I can setup characters for these players. For example, if someone is a calling station, gametime + will show a telephone by their name, so I will know to make a value bet on the river even if my hand isn't the nuts. Now, I just need to know how to play against the other styles.
posted by Steve K at 9:29 AM
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