Poker Dreams Online
Turning $10 into $100 then $1000 and more

Part of the benefit of playing online poker is the multitude of various bonuses that the poker sites offer you. It is a very competitive business and bonuses are part of the game.

Here is what I have received the past week:

1. Cake Poker is offering me free entry into a $25,000 tournament if I cash in 4 3 of clubs Gold Cards. If you are not familiar with Gold Cards, they are just an extra point earning aspect offered by Cake. Since I have the cards, I could enter into the tournament but payout is only to the top 3 players. That’s a lot of time investment for a very slim chance of return. The highest I have ever placed to date in a large tournament like this is 4th and although I hope to break this record one day, I would like to see at least payout to the top 10%.
2. Cake Poker is also offering me a 25% reload bonus of up to $100. This is something I would love to take advantage of but I haven’t got any money on the bench at this time in the challenge. In the future, I plan to pull a portion of my winnings out so that I may take advantage of these types of offers.
3. Finally, Party Poker just sent me an email with a bonus offer. This is the greatest one yet. NO DEPOSIT REQUIRED. (You gotta love party for their bonus offers). If I earn 1000 points in the next 10 days, I can earn $100 !! Payout is also broken out into $10 increments so 100 points will earn $10. My bankroll is pretty low so it will be quite the grind to even get 100 points but why not give it a go.

It has been a while since I have had time to update my blog. I have played a bit of poker but not enough to have any real impact on my bankroll. The Party Poker chart tracker is finally up. My bankroll is only at $14.90 which has dropped down a bit since my last post but definitely enough to use in the challenge.


My Cake balance is once again getting close to that magic $100 mark. It has definitely been a bumpy road but I have a good feeling that soon I will breakthrough again and continue in the right direction.

I am now down to less than a day remaining to meet the requirements for receiving the $15 Party Poker bonus. After playing 2154 hands I have cleared only 64% and so I am declaring this one too hard to achieve. But my play was definitely not all wasted. My bankroll on the Party Poker site is now at just over $33. So take away the 15 and I am still at $18. A reasonable starting point to include this site as part of the challenge.


The technique that I started using to try and get as many Party Points as possible is to play as many low limit tables at once. Once I got up to $24, I was playing 6 $0.02/$0.04 tables, bringing $4 to each one. This has proven to work very well. I plan to try out this strategy on Cake to help get me out of my funk on that site.


I am now up to 3 sites which is already becoming too many although I do find it good to hedge my bets by spreading out the action. Thus meeting the requirement of not keeping all my eggs in one basket. As I am fully aware in the past, you never know when Gamblore is going to come back to deliver a devastating blow to my bankroll.


Because I currently do not receive a rakeback bonus for Full Tilt (signed up with the site too long ago with an affiliate to receive Poker Office software which I no longer use), my cash games will be limited on this site with a stronger focus on tournaments.


The rakeback at Cake poker is a whopping 33% so this is where my cash game play will take place and I do like the double up tournament which I have mentioned in my previous posts. Hopefully I can turn around my cash game play on this site as it has been pretty ugly lately.


Finally at Party Poker, although they do not offer rakeback, they do have an interesting rewards program that has just been revamped and simplified. One of the features I like is the ability to buy cash and bonuses with earned Party Points.

I got a great email from Party Poker today. They have given my account bonus cash. Now Party Poker is a site that I had tried a while back but had pulled my money out about a couple years ago. Ever since then, a few time a year they award my with a bonus in the area of $10-$15. This money I can keep if I played the required number of raked hands. In the past I always played for a while but then ended up being very aggressive and just losing the bonus money. Hey it was just free money anyways and this was a site I no longer played at.


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.

For those of you who are fairly new to online poker and have not yet signed up to a site, I invite you to take advantage of the rakeback promotion available through Poker Dreams Online. Just go to rakeback.pokerdreamsonline.com and follow the instructions for the site you wish to play at.


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.

I had an interesting day with my poker play today. Cake Poker was nice and steady and I was able to make consistent gains playing cash games. However, when I switched over to Full Tilt, things got a little dicey. For starters, my cash games were split between 1 good table and 1 bad table. I even had to rebuy once. Sometimes it just seems like the turn and river are just out to get you. I played a lot of hands and ended up down almost $9.


During this time I also entered a large $1 rebuy/add-on tournament. There was 638 people playing but I decided to give it a shot anyways. After about a half hour in I ended up busting out. I felt my play was pretty good though so I decided to rebuy in for another $1 and 1500 chips. This time things were going well and by the time the cutoff for the add-on came, I was up to 9,000 chips and 52nd place (top 63 get paid). With another $1 and 2000 more chips, I moved into 41st place. And then comes the CRUSHING BLOW!


Here is how it went… I managed to get up to 41,000 chips (10th place) with 147 players left and then I was dealt Aces. I was first to act in early position and decided to just call for 500 chips. The table was pretty active by this point so I figured there was going to be a raiser. It was then folded to the button who decided to raise it up to 1000. Both the small and big blind called and now it was time to make my move. I re-raised to 6000. Everyone dropped out except the small blind who happened to be in 9th place.


The flop comes 6, 9, 4 rainbow. I figure I gotta have this. There was a small bet to me and then I re-raised all-in thinking he must have a high pocket pair or AK,AQ. CALLED !! Hmmm, at this point I am praying that he shows a couple of Kowboys. But no, my worst nightmare was realized, pocket 9s are shown. The turn and river didn’t help and just like that, I was out.


I wish I could say that this didn’t effect me but alas I cannot. So what did I do? I started up a $10+1 9 man sit-n-go. One of my stronger games from a while ago but definitely beyond the bankroll budget for the challenge. I played well and was able to place 1st winning $45 but there was that small tinge of guilt for letting my emotions get the better of me again. I should have had my bankroll to at least $110 before trying of tournament of this cost.


At the end of the day though it’s the bankroll balance that counts and I ended with my best day yet.


2009 is almost here so cheers and have a Happy New Year!!

The last few weeks of play have not been very fruitful. Ever since my big loss, my play seems to have fallen a bit into a grind with not much movement in my bankroll. Today proved a bit better with earnings of just over $10 across Cake and Full Tilt but I am still a ways off from the highs I had earlier in the month.


As I mentioned in my previous post, I have tightened up my risk by only playing $0.05/$0.10 cash games until I reach a $100. This is proving to go ok as it is much easier to limit risk as the maximum brought into the table is only $10. For a change today, I also played 4 tables at once. This is the most so far during the challenge but I used to play up to 6 tables at once so this isn’t anything new. With 4 tables at Cake, I was able to make just over $7.00 in a half hour. Not bad.


I am hoping my tournament play will turn around as well. After 4 losses in a row at Cake, I finally got a win in a $2.20 double up tournament. What I was touting as my gravy train tournament has proven to be fairly stingy lately. To get a good feel though, I will need to play a lot more tournaments to see how it all averages out.


HAPPY HOLLIDAYS !!

Last night I was able to play a lot of poker at Cake, but this didn’t
translate into big gains for the bankroll. In fact it was the opposite.
I ended with a $45 hit. That was almost half my bankroll. The only
highlights on my play was wins in the 2 sit-n-go tournaments I played.


How Did This Happen?


Well it came down to 2 factors, the first was not stopping when my
losses started piling up. The second was unleashing the inner Hulk
which simply wanted to try to recoup my losses quickly by being very
aggressive. I was playing $0.10/$0.20 no-limit cash games on 3 tables.
Although I doubled up on 1 table, I busted out multiple times on the
other tables and kept reloading another $20. Man, what was I thinking!


What happens to my psychology when I get a steady stream of winning
sessions is that I feel that I am good enough to make back my losses in
the session and end on a positive note. Most times I can recoup but it
is a slippery slope and once I start sliding, I don’t hesitate before
reloading the tables and then down I go. This has happened to me before
prior to the challenge but the difference this time is that I am
focusing on the problem.


To prevent this in the future, I have decided to enact some more hard and
fast rules for the challenge.

1. I am now going to have a daily loss limit which is equal to
   20% of my bankroll. This will be effective once I reach $50. I would
   like to get this down to %10 but for now I need a little more breathing
   room.
2. I have now decided that there will be set bankroll levels
   that need to be reached prior to playing higher level limit games. These levels are:
   1. $0.05/$0.10 until $100
   2. $0.10/$0.20 until $250
   3. $0.25/$0.50 until $500
   4. $0.50/$1.00 until $1000

I am hoping these changes will steady my play and reduce the massive hits like the one I just experienced.

It took a month to the day but I have passed the $100 mark at Cake Poker!! A $100 may not seem like much but getting 10 times return on investment is pretty good. Once again the new sit-n-go tournaments I found at Cake proved profitable. This time I played three $5 tournaments and placed in 2 of them.


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.

With an increased bankroll, I feel a little more comfortable with expanding my play a bit more. Today I focused solely on Cake Poker and found the tournament button for the first time during the challenge. I started off playing a $3.30 6 man sit-n-go. Top 2 places get paid. The tourny was going pretty good and I was sitting in 3rd place with 4 players remaining. And then the Kowboy’s rolled into town to back me up so I shot out a pot size raise and then ….. here comes a re-raise all-in by the chip leader and then another caller goes all in. Hmmm.. with no hesitation I called. Flop come QJ8 rainbow. Looking good for me . Now the turn, it’s a King !! After my initial ecstatic cheer, I remembered the flop cards. Crap! The chip leader had an A10. Well my hand didn’t improve on the river and I was out empty handed.


Not to be detoured, I found another sit-n-go format that I hadn’t tried before. It’s a 10 player sit-n-go but each of the top 5 players get paid double the tourny buy-in minus the entrance fee. So once the 6th player is ousted the tourny stops and everyone left standing gets paid.


To start, I tried a $2 version of the double up game. A few bad moves and I ended in 8th. Well not the best start but I was still intrigued. I tried another $2 and this time I made it to the end. $2.20 in, $4 out. I think I got this one figured out now. Solid steady play is the key and the risk reward has a good balance for the challenge. I decided that I would have 1 more go at it. This time I chose the $5 version and once again I made the top 5. I think I have found my new game.


During my tournament play, I also had a couple $0.10/$0.20 10 man cash games running. I took a bit hit on my aces and lost $15 on the hand but I was able to battle back and after 200 hands I was back into the positives.


On the challenge front, I am now oh so close to the first level in my challenge of $10 to $100. This is of course just on the Cake Poker site. For a quick summary of my overall winnings from all sites, there is now a Stats section in the sidebar which shows best sessions, worst sessions and monthly earnings.