Party Poker Blog

"If you're no longer a novice, but not a professional player, game selection may be the key to winning money. Without using any selection, you'll probably lose dramatically. By using selection moderately, you'll probably lose a little or break even. But by using game selection prudently and consistently, you probably will be a winner from now on."
Mike Caro

Can you guess where the best games are? Of course, you can.

Blogger went down tonight. Lost my original post.
VERY pissed.

Plus work is kicking my ass.

So now, be prepared for an uber-Guinness-fueled poker rant.

If you are new here, please bookmark and check out the poker blogs on the right. Great writing and insight. What a crazy crew the poker bloggers are. Let's see here; we have a cop, dot-com millionaires, a surgeon, an actor/writer, a chemical engineer, a playwright, several obligatory puter programmers, an ex-Wall Street Trader, several online poker pro's (unemployed), an aircraft traffic controller, a lawyer, a comic, a couple students, a hilarious fat guy from Texas and a professional bioterrorist vegan. That's a pretty damn interesting, diverse group of people, and that's not everyone.

So thanks for reading. Lots of good poker stuff to point out if Blogger allows it.
Sorry for any attitude - I'm just making this up as I drink go along, damnit.

Hrm, poker might have jumped the shark today: Robert Varkonyi was on Howard Stern this morning, hawking some crazy video.
ANNOUNCING WISE GUYS ON TEXAS HOLD'EM

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It is a teaching tool using some celebs, a few from the Sopranos, to show how to play hold-em. I see he has that annoying Willie Garson on there also from Celebrity Poker Showdown.

Also Stern and his cronies were helping us out by teaching the fish that any 2 suited was a good starting hand, specifically mentioning 5 2 suited. They had some other bad advice also, dont remember any more specifics.

Oh yeah another one was to stay in with any pocket pair even deuces no matter how much betting their was preflop, cause you never know, a deuce could come on the flop. I think he even complained about a hand from his Friday game where he folded 92 preflop only to see two 2's on the flop.

Gotta love it.
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Ok, maybe I was wrong on the Jump the Shark thing. Perhaps it's just more of the same, Poker as Cultural Juggernaut. Either way, Stern has been playing in Atlantic City. Damnit, I'd love to hear a Party Poker radio ad on Stern's show.

Nothing against PokerStars, but I loaded up some 3.6 tonite and the average number of players seeing the flop on all THREE full tables was 30% or less. Please, load up Pokertracker yourself and see the cold, hard numbers. Party Poker has about seventy 3.6 tables and it sure ain't 30% to the flop there. It's the heart of the poker Gold Rush and you're refusing to mine in the main vein. Think game selection, damnit.

I don't understand poker players who haven't learned that schooling fish is a good thing.

Saw this interesting thread on 2+2 - "Will Party Poker go the way of Paradise Poker and lose market share?"

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I much prefer Paradise to Party/Empire; it feels more like real poker. I'm sick of sitting at a table with 9 morons at Party that continually seems to suck straights and flushes out of the river with their 62o to beat my AA that turns into losing trips.

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Unbelievable. You're mad that there's bad players at Party?
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Soooo many posts like that, so little time. Oh, all right, I'll share yet another regurgitated message board rant about how online poker is fixed or rigged. This guy (per usual) is a winning player in brick and mortar card rooms, yet just can't beat Party Poker or Poker Stars. I wonder how many of these I've read over the years?

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I guess I am just a lousy player, but I cannot take it anymore. I win
consistently in areal casinos and cannot win shit in these rigged online
poker dumps.

I am sick of losing with the best hand time and time again by some
miracle river card. Sick and tired of having to deal with incompentant
support staff. Sick of always getting my pocket kings or aces beaten out by
3-8 off time and time and time and time again.

I am pissed off that it is so easy to deposit and take it out of my bank
account. But, it it such a hassle when I try to get my money out.

Why in the fuck would anyone put up with this online poker shit. Just go
play at a real casino. Atleast there odds are you wont be getting
screwed out of your money by some greedy ass scam site, and colluders.
Maybe you guys are really really good and can even push out a small win
rate even though all odds are against you. Sorry I am just not that
LUCKY. It is hard enough to win let alone having to fight tons of
bullshit factors against you.

FUCK YOU PARTY POKER

FUCK YOU POKERSTARS

And yes this is how I really feel!
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LOL, priceless.
The most appropriate response:

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Online poker values different skills and is very different than casino
poker, y'know. Or maybe you don't....

Some players lose at poker simply because they refuse to get better. Saying "change the deck" or "the game is rigged" is easier than spending months and years to improve your game.
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Yup. Of course, I'm personally too paranoid of collusion to play high-limit online poker, but I've been beating the low-mid limits for so long that I know, even if there are cheaters playing these stakes, they need a new hobby.

Looking back a year ago, Party Poker had nearly 3,000 players. Early December, 22,000 players. And we thought THAT was insane. 45,000 and due for another spike...I suppose I'll cease documenting this exponential growth someday, but for now I'm going to beat my damn drum. You guys truly don't know how lucky you are.

Time for some poker linkage:

First up, David Ross, Playing online for a living week 45. Yet another superb post. He was asked later about his starting hand requirements and he replied that he primarily uses Abdul's. Two snippets per David:

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That put my final total for the week at $4,262, my 2nd biggest week ever. I have averaged over $2,500 / wk for the last 8 weeks, making even more certain that the fresh blood has made the Party/Empire games softer.
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Poker Tracker has also identified 5 or 6 regular opponents that I have played over 10 sessions with, that are significant winners. Until recently I had all of them pegged as recklessly aggressive. Clearly weak tight is not the way to play shorthanded poker.
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The latter was for Grubby's benefit.
Go read Grubby's, poker playing sister's post:
Good Beat, ½ Beat and Bad Beat - Great stuff per usual.

The Poker Babe gives a first hand account of being a prop poker player at the Bike, in LA.

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One of the questions I get asked most is: What is a prop player? Considering the recent boom in poker, it makes sense that many people are not aware of what the job would entail.
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Interesting stuff per being a prop. I still wish she would write more like Linda at PokerWorks or Felicia.

Article about WSOP heart-throb, Russ Boyd, and future owner of rakefree.com.
The unabridged version of what went down with pokerspot.com.
Russ “Dutch” Boyd to Open a New Online Card Room

MS Sunshine has the abridged version.
PokerSpot and Dutch

How many of you know that the poker room, Doyle Brunson, endorsed back in the day, Highlands, was hacked and went belly-up many years ago? And that Doyle himself paid off *every* player even though he had no obligation to do so.

Times, they have changed. Poker is mainstream now. There aren't many art forms that America has invented outside of jazz music and Alcoholics Anonymous. Documenting the meteoric rise of Texas Hold Em has been ton of fun. I'll keep blogging until we jump the shark.

I keep babbling about PokerTracker. I know my fellow poker bloggers have listened and grabbed it, but again, I can't stress enough how important it is. I guarantee that "Dude" isn't using it - that's my testimonial.
Go read: PokerTracker forums.

If I ever post under a domain, I'll do screen shots and a full tutorial for PokerTracker.

Segue: poker news:

A classic "Poker is Red Hot" article featuring: Mimi Rogers, James Woods, Clint Eastwood, Jon Favreau, Tobey Maguire, Ron Livingston, Ben Affleck, Gabe Kaplan, Leonardo di Caprio, David Schwimmer, Chris Ferguson, Annie Duke, Amir Vahedi and Daniel Negreanu.
Celebrity participation brings poker upscale

Sadly, no mention of Wil Wheaton.

My local paper:
Poker comes into play
As the game gets more popular, more friends are gathering to hold 'em and to fold 'em

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"It's just the biggest explosion of interest I have ever seen," says North Avondale resident Rick Steiner, who has won six national poker championships and who now spends most of his time producing Broadway shows.
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Of course, there was a follow-up article titled:
Is home poker against the law?

Yes, I'm still thinking about running another large tourney. Looking at April.

More college campuses catching hold em fever, this time in New Hampshire:
Poker, Celts and daily diaries

And finally. a behind the scenes look at Binion's Horseshoe negotiations:
Downtown: Offer Horseshoe Sale

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Lawyers were scrambling late Friday night to salvage the proposed sale of Binion's Horseshoe to MTR Gaming Group and the World Series of Poker to Harrah's Entertainment.
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Alrighty then, time to link up the brand new poker blogs.

as the tank turns

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we ordered pizza and fixated ourselves to the counch to watch the thursday night line up. i have to say, donald trump is one smart man.
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The Poker School Club Blog. First post!

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If you are not interested in Ultra High limit poker then go find a checkers blog and leave us big dogs to our business.
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It ain't Gambling

It's an excellent point. It ain't gambling.

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Internet poker grew by more than 600 percent, both in number of players and volume of money bet, between the end of 2002 and the end of 2003.
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Moving back to old-school bloggers, Pauly had a great write-up about the NYC poker blogger home game.

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I let out a monster sigh of relief. I almost got an erection stacking up my chips because it was such an amazing bluff. There's nothing like the adrenaline rush that seizes your entire body after you bluffed at a huge pot in poker... and won.
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Want to know why online poker is superior to B&M?
LA player, Hdouble, lists his top five reasons without even mentioning smelly people. Not in a good way, smelly.
The Education of A PartyPoker Player

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1. Multi-table play: playing multiple tables allows you to play against worse players with a much lower variance, since you more than double the number of hands you can play.
2. Rake: in LA, the casinos are just raking the hell out of the players without conscience.
3. Convenience: I posted about this in my last post, but the drive and wait time to get to the B&M really add up.
4. Table Selection: In LA, you sit where they put you.
5. Player skill: At the $6-12 level, most of the players I face are decent players.
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K, I'm done ranting. To anyone who read this far, thank you. I'm sorry for the bigass honking post, but I picked blogging over playing tonight. That was probably a mistake, I know.

Damn Guinness. And Blogger.

Per the World Poker Blogger Tour Redux, we are still on for tomorrow night. I emailed Support about hats, last-longer bets and increasing our starting chip stack to 1,500. I'm not holding my breath. Sadly, MeanGene and FatGuy can't defend their titles. How convenient. :)

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to come and read this poker blog. That makes it worthwhile to come on here and ramble every night. Also, it's too freaking cool to see someone take my humble advice, jump on Party Poker and win immediately. That's the best. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to email me.

Link of the Day:
Tell a Friend He's Stupid Today
"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities," according to Justin Kruger and David Dunning of the Cornell University department of psychology. "This overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled ... suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."