I was able to reach a major online poker milestone today by breaking the $1000 barrier in my challenge. Taking a break from Cake Poker, I decided to bring up Party Poker for a change. Similar to my style of play as of late, I played on 6 tables but at $0.10/$0.25 blinds due to my lower bankroll at Party. After about an hour of play, I decided to call it quits after making just over $17 across the tables. This was enough to achieve my challenge milestone so I didn’t want to risk tampering with my elation of the achievement.
The play at Party Poker definitely seemed easier. At the stakes I was playing at, there was always a few players with under $5 and a lot of loose callers and bluff betters. By playing tight aggressive, I was able to capitalize.
Although Party seems to play a bit easier than Cake, I think I will stick with Cake for a while due to the large rakeback. Party has revamped their promotions as well which may equate to a decent rakeback but I would need to earn a lot more points to take advantage.
What now is the next challenge level? Well to keep with the theme I am now shooting for $10,000!
You may have noticed that the sidebar still says current bankroll of $855.35. This is because it is only a summary of completed months played. In the future, I hope to have a more realtime update to my status. For daily updates, please browse through the charts on the Challenge Overview page.
Oh and you may have noticed that there is now a webpage icon associated with Poker Dreams Online. To do this, I just created a custom favicon.ico file using photoshop and a plugin from Telegraphics. ]]>
This time, they have loaded my account with $15 to play with. The timing is good because the bonus amount falls right in line with what I am doing with the challenge. I have decided to focus my play this time and see what happens. In order to clear the bonus, I need to accumulate 120 points. This will probably take a while as I have already played 477 hands but only earned 14.88 points. My play consisted of 1 $0.05/$0.10 cash game and 1 $0.02/$0.04 game.
I haven’t decided yet if I will add Party Poker to the Challenge Overview but I should know in the next week or so. ]]>
If you are not familiar with what rakeback is, here is a quick explanation. When you play at an online poker site, the site earns their money through a rake. The amount can vary per site and game type. An example of a rake in a cash game is that for every $20 in a pot, the house (poker site) will take $1. For tournaments, the rake is generally included as part of the registration fee. Example, a $2 + $0.20 tournament means that $2 will go into the tournament prize pool and the $0.20 is the rake.
Now, if you signed up under a rakeback promotion, a portion of the rake that you have paid will be paid back to you. This works out to a continual bonus which will pay you extra for simply doing what you are already doing. ]]>
Well the next milestone to reach is the $1000 mark. It seems like a huge hill to climb but if I can maintain my current pace, I should be able to reach it in January. I don’t expect the play to be much harder in the next limits based on my past experience but I will have to wait and see.
On a side note, I found a really interesting site today that tracks your online tournament ranking against other players on sites like Full Tilt and Poker Stars. Check out Official Poker Rankings. ]]>