These aren’t typical coinflip situations, which I understand and don’t get too angry the umpteenth time someone calls my AK all-in with 44. Yet tit-for-tat, I believe I should be winning my share when I call an all-in with 10-10 and they get their A or K (I still can’t bring myself to call all-ins with low pairs).

60/40′s are okay.

But the others…

Tonight, in the space of 10 hands at one table:

KK loses to AQ, all-in on flop of J-3-6 (13.5%)
AA loses to 55, all-in preflop (18.2%)
QQ loses to 44, all-in preflop (18.1%)
AA equals QQ, all-in preflop with straight on board (0.5%)
QQ loses to 10-J, all-in preflop (13.3%)

The last two were mine.

Action hands or what?

I saw a friend all-in with QQ against AA. The flop was A-Q-J. He rivered quads.

Even I had the good end once, with KJs and an all-in on the 10-A-x flop (against his AQ). Rivered a royal flush, my 6th ever. Still lost the SnG.

The kicker though was my bustout tonight, pushing and seeing someone call me with…10-2.

I expected to see overcards or pairs or connectors as usual, but ten-deuce… suited.

And yeah, he covered me by 5x (I was 10x blinds) and put me on overcards and 60/40 cards that I probably didn’t contain either of his cards in my hand.

And yeah, we both paired the flop of A-9-2 with him rivering the 10.

And yeah, I do want calls like that.

But man, 10-2 just seems a kick in the groin, like the evil poker gods teasing that I don’t even need to be beaten by a somewhat equal hand, a 10-2 will suffice.

And that’s where my luck’s been in the short 2008 that’s seen me win a best double finish in the Daily Double, play four of the FTOPs events including the Main Event, and a whole lot of SnGs. Coupled with other bad games I shouldn’t be playing, though, I’m already down more this year than I lost last year.

Yet I can’t seem to break away from playing (damn Iron Man).

And over and over, the beats keep coming.

While watching a few of my games where I was constantly dominated with pairs (twice against Aces — a beat I don’t mind because at least they’re holding up for someone), a friend said he didn’t believe in luck until he saw me play and doesn’t want to stand next to me in a thunderstorm.

Snowplows totaling my car notwithstanding, I don’t think I’m too unlucky. In general. But maybe narrowly avoiding death for two of my nine lives is costing me these percentage points in cards.

And maybe I need to take a long break to let all this bad luck stink on me wash away.

I just hate to go out down instead of on top.

In any event, apologies for a downer of a final post.

Now you know why I’ve been dragging my fingers to write this.

Much thanks to Linda for welcoming me and the other bloggers into her home over a year ago and for having too much patience for my laziness in wanting to post something upbeat rather than the above drivel. The Bellagio just isn’t the same without her, and whenever I’m in town I still look around the tables thinking I’ll see her seamlessly dealing the big game or 4/8 limit or high-limit coin-tosses.

Before I had a blog, I read Linda’s. She showed it was possible to talk about poker yet really talk about life.

And thanks to Tony G., who I had the pleasure of sharing blogspace with. I get such a kick out of him tilting players, and by all accounts, he’s one of the most sincerely nicest poker players off-camera. There aren’t too many of those.

And to my fellow archived PokerWorks bloggers, Iggy, Change100, Speaker, Maudie, Amy, Michael Craig, and CC — an esteemed and intimidating group of powerhouse writers who make me not know what to write.

Jeez what is this, the Oscars?

Anyway, I’ll still be watching for updates from Linda, Tony G., and Ken’s addendums.

Thanks for the indulgence. I hope to be playing poker less, other games even less than that, and maybe catch up on sleep.

You can catch my progress on all that over at pokergrub.com.

I’ll pop in now and again, with slot and life talk on pokergrub.com and poker talk here. Or a bit of both.

I’m desperately trying to maintain my sanity in the low-limit SnGs, thanks to a bet I made with a friend. You know the kind, whoever wins the most money playing 50 of them this month wins a free steak dinner (which includes dessert, because dessert is part of the meal).

Only he thought I said $10+1 instead of $11+1, and the big difference in playing the non-turbos is a few more years off my life in frustration.

On the other hand, variance is much lower and my bankroll hasn’t been making the wild stock market waves.

I have a dozen and a half left to go, and if I don’t completely nosedive I should be okay. He finished his at $8 up for a 1.6 percent ROI. I’d like to think I can do better, but the last time I tried this in the turbos, I ended up over $100 down (but still won the contest).

Adding extra intrigue to our wager is a lapdance, though he’s too hairy to perform. I could take him to Little Darlings, where lapdances are $40 (for contact), but I’d never exploit a bet like that, would I?

The past couple months I’d been doing really well at Full Tilt, winning a couple cheap multis that I’d mention in more detail if not for the fact that I dumped it all in a bad run at SnGs.

Now I’m trying to grind my way back up, and slowly but surely it’s working. Just need to maintain patience and not jump ship and go wild on the shorthanded cash games that I’m still fond of doing.

It’s been awhile since there’s been a really good bonus offer from Lederer et al., but they just announced a nice one for people like me who don’t normally get bonuses.

Those (also like me) who complain about not getting bonuses is actually a savvy marketing move that I first noticed from Party Poker — lure players who haven’t played in awhile with bonuses to return to playing and shun the loyal players. Why spend more money on players they already have in their pockets? Complain and threaten to leave, and good riddance, we don’t need another 12-tabler shark hogging all the cash.

It’s why I still play on Full Tilt without rakeback and despite not getting bonuses when everyone else seemingly is.

Anyway, the new bonus offer rewards Iron Man members with a big juicy bonus in January.

In December, just make one of the four Iron Man levels (bronze, silver, gold, iron), and you’ll get a bonus not just for that month but for all months that you made Iron Man in 2007.

For every month you’ve made bronze, you get $25 in bonus. For every month you’ve made silver, you get $50 in bonus. For gold, $75. For iron, $100.

Up to $600 (a discrepancy on their site says $600 in one place and $1200 in another) in bonus will be in qualified accounts beginning January, and after working it off, the lump sum of it will be credited at the end of the month.

For those with rakeback, I assume it would count against that rakeback, but it’s still a good deal to get the bonus plus remaining rakeback.

Now to try to sneak into bronze next month despite another too-soon Vegas trip and the Christmas holidays.

I feel incredibly guilty for not being in California, particularly for my mother. I had a flight booked, work was ready to let me off for bereavement, but grubette called at the last second, saying I shouldn’t come out.

Knowing my mother, she’d end up feeling guilty herself if I spent the money to visit her.

On the way to work, I spoke with grubette. We’d planned on visiting that weekend, and I asked her if she was going to go early. She said she was already an hour away.

More guilt.

In the grub clan, it’s like we’re a bunch of relapsed Catholics and we aren’t even religious.

grubette and I emailed back and forth. She’s much more poetic in her emails:

We looked through many of her things to try and find her will and I found a jade necklace that was still in its envelope, ungifted. Finders keepers, I did keep it.

It was sad, a forgotten treasure she bought for someone probably months in advance, sitting in an old purse along with a ton of credit card bills and used airline tickets.

All these were stacked neatly, still in their envelopes with one side slit open from grandpa’s letter opener. I loved that every single envelope was opened the same way, a neat slit on the side, not the top. Most documents were placed back in that same envelope.

All that junk, easy to throw away, but no one wanted to get rid of anything save for the stolen restaurant fast food napkins and disposable chopsticks in her drawers.

I mentioned another random memory of one Christmas when Grandma sent me a present containing a box of 4000 pennies (perhaps a harbinger of my love for penny slots). It took all night to count and wrap them in 50-cent rolls, and the next day my father took me to the bank to deposit it.

grubette responded:

Oh yeah those pennies.. still, snapshots huh? A whole life reduced to a few poignant memories. I guess that’s what life is all about anyway.

When we were at the nursing home moving all her furniture, this woman kept following us, wanting to ride up and down in the elevator for no reason other than to stimulate her Alzheimer’s ridden brain. She giggled like a schoolgirl, pleased by something so simple.

I’ve thought of the whole irony of growing old before, but it seemed exceptionally pronounced when someone dies and you clean out their things.

Grandma reverted nearly full circle back to being a toddler: unsteady walking, a twin bed with rails so she wouldn’t fall out, diapers, needing help taking a shower and brushing her teeth, a sock contraption to aid her in putting on her socks, making construction paper animals to pass the time, using zippers and pullovers because buttons are too hard, watching cartoons, having mealtime be the highlights of her day, being checked on every few hours to make sure she was breathing, being pushed around in a strollerlike wheelchair, and worst of all, being talked down to like a child, no longer able to participate in adult conversation and instead being asked inane questions like “Want a drink?” or “Do you have to use the bathroom?”

Sad to say that is all our destinies.

***

I’ll write more this weekend and catch up on my trip to the boats, Atlantic City, my confoundingly slow computer, and oh yeah, poker.

Most of the time we were sent there to get out of our parents’ way so they could have some alone time.

One visit, we left our father to care for our beloved hamster Sam who had outlasted all the other hamsters. My father was succinct and straight to the point in his letter to us about how Sam was doing: “Dear kids, Sam’s dead.” No beating around the bush there.

Another visit, we arrived home only to find that the house was sold and all our stuff was packed up in boxes, ready to move into a new house.

Though we weren’t military brats, we moved around quite a bit in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.

The one stable place was Grandma’s house.

Like a typical o’er the river and through the woods house way away in the magical California desert where the tumbleweeds roamed free, it was in a small neighborhood that contained a Foster’s Freeze with a seemingly endless supply of free ice cream cones.

We spent more time outdoors in those two weeks than the entire year on the East Coast. Most was spent at cousins’ houses, getting sunburned at pools (and peeling off the dead skin), drinking generic grape and orange soda, playing hide-n-seek, riding bikes, and then crashing back at Grandma’s house watching uncut R-rated movies on HBO. The magical land of California had cable, and back home we were still adjusting rabbit ears.

Of Grandma’s three daughters, my mother was oldest by a number of years, and the other two – my aunts – still lived in the house and put up with us loud, snot-nosed kids over part of their summer vacation.

They showed us around town, playing miniature golf with the new boyfriend of the week, seeing a movie (I remember becoming uncomfortably aroused at Brooke Shields’ body double while watching The Blue Lagoon sitting next to my soon-to-be-uncle), eating pizza, buying us comic books, rollerskating (before rollerblading), eating all-you-can-eat salad buffets, and general horsing around (gambling had not yet entered our vocabulary).

One aunt called us “the horrible ‘orribles.”

Whenever we’d return to D.C., I remember crying myself to sleep, missing the relatives in California and all our tan misadventures.

In D.C., we had no family outside the four of us. In California, we had nothing but family.

I remember Grandma would be in the kitchen cooking or in the bedroom napping or in the sewing room that was a separate part of the house for some reason.

And boy howdy could that woman sew up a storm. During the day she worked at a department store, and we’d go on a spree, picking up clothes at a heavy discount, then Grandma would spend all night hemming (not hawing) on her Singer sewing machine based on the pins she stuck in our cuffs. She had a brief business buying old silk kimonos, cutting them up, and fashioning the material into new dresses for sale.

I remember her always sucking on some hard candy and feeding us See’s Candies like they were pills that were good for us (I liked the nuts and chews). To this day, I can always expect a box of See’s Candies under the Christmas tree.

I remember her huge mane of respectable gray and white hair, that had me wanting to spray my hair in tufts of white to mimic hers.

In Grandma’s house is where I wrote my first short story, typed up on an old manual typewriter with no white-out key. I imagined I could spy on the neighbors’ young daughter as she changed clothes, and wrote a Rear Window scenario (albeit with lots of blood and gore) before I’d ever heard of Hitchcock. After Christmas that year, I included Xeroxed copies of that story along with my thank-you notes. My first taste of rejection was not hearing back from any of the relatives about my perverted little story.

Christmases then were spent in California, and after Christmas dinner, the jewelry box would come out. Not wanting any part of this, the boys (me and my grandfather) would be in the living room watching war movies. All the girls would sit at the kitchen table in anticipation as Grandma fetched her prize jewelry box from a hidden location only she knew.

The girls would take turns trying on rings, necklaces, pendants, and earrings, laying claim to this or that, not realizing the implication was she’d get it when Grandma was no longer around. Grandma knew which bauble belonged to which daughter or granddaughter (at the time, grubette was the only granddaughter), and based on how she was treated during the year, she would change ownerships as many times as an old Ford.

Grandma treated her jewelry box like Santa treated his naughty-or-nice list.

In her heyday, Grandma was a force of a woman, going through an early and controversial divorce, possibly being pregnant before marriage, bringing up my mother practically on her own, then remarrying and having more kids. She never learned how to drive because she was too busy.

When I think of the house, I think of my grandmother, I think of the smell, I think of the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, I think of the desk where my grandfather would write out Christmas cards, insert a $20 bill, and sign his full name, as if we didn’t know who he was.

My grandmother died this morning.

No beating around the bush, just like Sam the hamster.

She’d been sick and had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a couple weeks ago. I had a flight booked this weekend to see her before things took a turn for the worse, but that turn came sooner than expected.

She’d complained of gallstones and was put on maybe too much morphine, because it had knocked her out for four days and they didn’t know when she’d awake.

Since her stroke a few years ago, she’d adopted a walker with the tennis balls for the rubber feet. She walked like Tim Conway as the old man on the Carol Burnett show, she had selected hearing when she selected when to wear her hearing aids, and she lost so much weight she was wearing her grandkids’ clothing.

But I prefer to think of her walking that department store as if she owned it, being greeted warmly by her fellow salespeople, and following that big gray mane of hair.

Rest in peace, Grandma.

Food? Polish women? Casino night? Poker Videos? How could I resist?

I still had the rental car, and we splurged on VIP parking for $15, though no one ever asked us to pay going in or out.

There were some gorgeous Polish females, but they all seemed underage and hanging out at the Led Zeppelin tribute band. By what they were wearing, the festival should’ve also had a jailbait exhibit.

Sampled some beer, mushroom eggrolls, beer, pieorgies, and beer.

One of the vendors was MoneyGram. If only I’d thought ahead to initiate a Poker Stars deposit.

Another vendor was a modeling agency, and I stopped by.

“Hi,” I said to the pretty girl behind the counter. “My friend and I would like to sign up to become models.”

The pretty girl looked at us and somehow stifled a harumph. She gestured to my friend and said, “Ohhh… he’s too old.”

I’m older than he is, but I took it as a polite way to say that we were both fugly and there was no way in Polish hell she’d let us sign up.

“How old do you have to be?” I said.

“Umm… 25.”

As soon as she said 25, I said, “I’m 24, is that okay?”

The pretty girl reluctantly handed me a clipboard to fill out.

“But my friend, how old do you think he is?”

“Oh,” the pretty girl said, “I have no way of knowing.”

I tried to get her to say an age, but she was too polite to.

The festival had all the carnival games — squirt the gun into the target to raise Tweety Bird, throw the basketballs into the hoop, throw the rings around bottles, fire a corkgun at the empty cans, etc.

Highly competitive, we played them all, including a few heads-up.

My favorite was Roller Race, called out by a carnival barker with all silver teeth and who referred to himself as “Soul Man.” In a dark alley, it would be a different situation.

At $2 a pop, we played the game (“the game is called roll the ball, not throw the ball”) at least a dozen times.

Not once did I win, and I’m convinced the thing’s rigged.

Set up like skeetball, you roll balls up an alley into a number of different-colored holes to increase the speed of your dog — red (run), blue (walk), yellow (crawl).

On one game, I rolled my ball into two red holes and still didn’t win. After 12 tries at this, you can develop at least some skill in rolling and aiming.

Yet a kid who couldn’t have been more than 3 years old ended up winning.

The punk was sitting on the lap of his mother, who also helped him roll the ball, which I’m sure is against the rules because it’s one player to a ball.

She selected a stuffed alligator as his prize, and I almost caught a sly wink from the mother to the barker. It was then I knew they were in cahoots.

The barker would call over couples, saying to the guy that he’s guaranteed to win a stuffed animal to impress his girl. And he did.

Pretty girls would play one time, and they would win.

But always, whenever a kid sat down, that kid would end up winning.

In a way, it makes sense because you don’t want adults continually hogging up the prizes and it’s fun when a little kid throws an upset and takes down all the adults.

But instead of rigging it, they could at least randomize it so it isn’t so obvious what’s going on.

Though I guess only the sick individuals playing the game 12 straight times would start to see the pattern maps going on.

Knowing Casino Night was there, we left it for the end as a sort of final treat after drinking enough. Blackjack, the Big Wheel, and 2/4 limit hold’em poker were being dealt. A max bet of $10 was in place, and chips were purchased with cash and redeemed with cash.

The chip box had only white chips which were $1 each. There couldn’t have been more than $100 in the box.

By the time we headed to Casino Night, we’d blown all our money on carnival games and food and beverages, and the convenient ATM in the hall was inconveniently out of service.

Across the street was a CVS, and the degenerate that I am, I tried taking $300 out of the ATM expecting to fleece some Polish poker donks but was denied because I’d maxed my withdrawal from the riverboat casino earlier that morning to play slots.
My friend withdrew $200, I borrowed $100, and we were good to go.

The festival closed at 10 p.m., which gave us a good hour. I envisioned raising and reraising every hand, taking down pots, and doing victory dances to Polish polkas.

But when we returned to Casino Night, they had just shut the chip box, saying they were shutting down at 9 p.m.

“But thank you guys for coming, and do come back next year.”

I considered slipping the guy a $20 just so we could sit down and play a few hands.

Damn Illinois and its charitable gaming laws. If I had his number, I would’ve called Mayor Daley to see if he could put in a stay of execution to extend to 10 p.m.

With my computer down, I couldn’t play online or even get online, so instead, we left the festival and headed to a neighborhood bar to drink some more while I scratched at all the bites I got from the Polish mosquitoes.

It’s okay in cash games because I time out and am sat out. In SnGs, I’m blinded out into a waste of a buy-in.

In these cases, Full Tilt is preferable to Poker Stars because Stars clues players in whether someone is sitting out. On Full Tilt, there’s no such message and I look like a tight player who folds really fast.

When getting home late, I have the need to login and play a couple SnGs. And by couple, I mean four to seven. I should rig a lock on my computer to not allow access during dawn hours, or pass a breathalyzer before booting up, or spit water at me when it’s my turn.

It’s more prevalent than I’d like – the past couple weeks, I’ve fallen asleep through over a dozen tournaments. While asleep, I’d also somehow entered myself into an Omaha tourney.

The odd thing is that I’ve placed 4th in most of them (including the Omaha) and cashed in two.

Just goes to show you that tight play is still rewarded, and not everything is based on ICM.

Or maybe my opponents don’t know how to play against my mad skillz as a semi-conscious SnG player.

***

Often when I multi-table SnGs, I play the same players who are also multi-tabling.

That and players playing the same cards is the concept behind Duplicate Poker, which boasts this way is more skill-based.

I’m going to check it out, mainly because over the next several Sundays, PokerNews will be offering $5000 freerolls to their PokerNews Cup in Australia (buy-in, accommodations, and $1500 cash for travel expenses), just by signing up through their link above and depositing.

***

There used to be a time that when a holiday weekend rolled around like Labor Day, all the major poker sites would compete against each other by offering reload bonuses.

Now that there are just a few places open to the U.S., they have a captive audience and don’t need to fight for players.

But any promotion is something extra, and today, Full Tilt begins a Party-like promotion called Lucky 7.

Earn 7 points in a day, enter the drawing, and you’re qualified to be 1 of 77 players to win $77.

One player will also win something from the Full Tilt Poker Store. They say the range runs from iPods to custom jerseys, so I guess the Mini Cooper is out.

The promo only lasts 7 days, through Sept. 7.

The nice thing about this promotion from FT’s perspective, is that they get players to return every day for 7 days, and maybe if they win while earning their 7 points, they’ll stick around. It also encourages play money players to dip their feet into real money, maybe with the new Gatorpay payment processor.

From the player’s perspective, it’s only 7 points. Odds are pretty slim of winning, but the odds are better than Mega Millions and it doesn’t cost anything extra.

***

Speaking of points, by the end of today I’ll have enough to qualify for FT’s Aussie Millions freeroll.

I’m hoping and guessing fewer than 150 players will qualify. Figuring I can outlast 50 of those just by folding, that puts me at 50:1 at winning one of those $18,000 packages.

Better odds than Mega Millions and Lucky 7 combined!

If too many more people qualify and play the freerolls, I’ll just go for the 100 Iron Man medals instead of the freeroll.

Ruthie said that “Bobby” got them for her. When people at the table saw Bobby off in the distance, they kept chanting his name.

“Bobby! Bobby!”

Ruthie said she and Bobby met 13 years ago playing poker and one day he presented her with these nifty shoes and even knew her size! Every time Ruthie won a pot that I was involved in, she said, “Oh here honey I don’t want to take your money,” and would pass me a stack of chips (I politely declined).

Bobby finally came for a visit and Ruthie introduced me as her friend (after all of 15 minutes chatting with her). Bobby was as friendly as a grandpa spending his kid’s inheritance.

I took a pic of her shoes and then showed it to Bobby, smiling and sitting at a 6/12 table, and said, “Bobby, Ruthie said you’d buy me a pair of these shoes!” I’ve never been called honey so many times in my life.

And finally last night, moving down to 4/8 because I was convinced my losses were on my poor play, and not the bad beats and bad dealers, I posted a little win: +$83.

It was a sweet win though, as most are, because the players (and dealers) at low-limit are as gregarious as Ruthie.

The only other woman at the table, Colma, said she wanted to adopt me after I bought the tipsy Laguna Beach native a Heineken. The dealer, after dealing a player out by accident, said the mistake was because I told him I’d give him $6000 if he dealt me the bad beat jackpot and he couldn’t concentrate (and I would have).

The loose guy at the table and I chatted about vodkas and happy hour prices (after I said I bought a $10.75 drink at Hawaiian Gardens, absurd for a place like that).

My play was about the same I think, but the cards were different. I beat KK with AA, I beat 99 with TT, I was making my straights and flushes. I was flopping top pair, top two pairs. But, low limit means chasers abound and they didn’t always hold up.

At the very least, I can end the month on a good note. Plus I got a 3.696% raise! And my puppy, now nearly 6 months old, is housetrained! And I’m going on vacation tomorrow, phone-less, email-less, internet-less, disconnected from poker and responsibility. It’s foreign.

Maybe I’ll return, beaming as much as Ruthie does.

I had just begun a Twitter account to document my Washington, D.C. and Atlantic City trip this weekend, and I ended up posting my attempt to get home.

It was eerie at work.  We have exposed ducts and they began shaking, with dust falling down around them like it was some special effect for a haunted house movie.  Then the power went out.

We were warned not to use the CTA trains because of debris and to take the bus instead.  A coworker offered a ride home and I gladly accepted, though our adventure was just sitting in traffic.

Several roads were blocked by fallen trees. People were turning down one-way streets because there was no other option.

Luckily, a couple of Mormons on bikes came to the rescue.

Here’s another victim of the 55 mph winds in the park near my apartment:

I should’ve just gone home; instead, I got something to eat and another storm or part of the same storm swept through and stuck around for awhile.

Toward home, these are the streets I had to cross. My canoe was in the shop, so I waded through all kinds of watery hepatitis.

We sure seem to be getting more than our share of rain. This is supposed to be the Windy City, not the Rainy City.

One thing’s for sure — if it’s raining tomorrow, I’m taking a cab.

Before the WSOP, Full Tilt gave away two main event packages every week for players who earned 3000 points from the prior Wednesday to Wednesday. This had the best overlay I’d seen in a long time, with less than 200 people playing the freeroll every week.

If you decided against the freeroll, you could get 75 Iron Man Medals.

Since the WSOP, they’ve been mum about any new promotions other than the regular Iron Man.

Now they’re back with a vengeance, offering biweekly freerolls for a mammoth $18k package to the Aussie Millions. And again, each freeroll will award two packages.

Qualifying began today (Wednesday) and runs every two weeks. Earn 5000 points within those two weeks and get your choice of the freeroll the following Sunday or 100 Iron Man Medals.

Just playing the minimum for Iron Man status is 200 points per day, or 2800 over two weeks. Those are points I’d be earning anyway. Going for the freeroll is 158 extra points per day, but unlike Iron Man, I can cram on the weekend.

I can’t wait to play this thing (and I’m already 500 points on my way). Here’s hoping there’re equally few players in each Aussie Millions freeroll as there were for the WSOP seats.

You need to be Gold Star to redeem the bonus.

Being one level below at Silver Star and with the majority of my play on Full Tilt (I like the software and tournament features better), I don’t see earning another 2000 points by the end of this month.

Worse, with less than $300 in my Stars account, chasing Gold Star could end up busting me.

It’s also irritating that even after redeeming the $285 bonus, it still requires a certain amount of play before it releases.

So I decided to put those points to use in other ways.

In the past, I’d used points for a few books and shirts. I could purchase a DVD player, which would come in handy because I can’t seem to stir up the motivation to stick my 5-month-old Netflix DVDs into my laptop to watch in one sitting (Netflix’s streaming is somehow more convenient to me). I could get an iPod. I could get more books and shirts.

A friend’s been doing well in the SnG freerolls that award one winner $11 in T$ for 70 FPPs. Maybe I could build up cash that way.

I gave it a shot, played almost a dozen, and lost them all, losing three in heads-up and one on the bubble despite falling asleep at the first level. I tend to shy away from any tournament that awards one prize, but the bad play does seem to make up for it.

I then tried the Sunday Million turbo entry for 2700 FPPs. Of 20 players, four $200+15 seats were guaranteed. I liked my odds at a 20 percent chance.

I came in 6th.

Not wielding my FPPs too well, I tried one more. This time I gave myself the best shot possible — a 10-table SnG where the top four win. A whopping 40 percent. Surely I should be able to outlast 60 percent of players. In multis, just folding every hand outlasts half the field after the first break.

The cost was a steep 5400 FPP, or the equivalent of 1 baseball cap and 10 posters of Isabelle Mercier.

For the $285 bonus at 25k FPP, each point is worth 1.14 cents.

For the tournament, 10 people paid 5400 FPP to win four seats adding up to $860, with each point worth 1.59 cents. And if I could turn my 5400 FPPs into the $215 entry, that would make each point worth 3.98 cents.

Though it didn’t much matter because I busted.

If I tried again, that would cut the 3.98-cent value in half, but at 1.99 cents, it’s still a better value than the $285 bonus… provided I win.

So I did, and this time I won.

Tried two more. Lost one, won one.

Then another 2700 tourney, and lost, but would’ve easily won had my AK held up against A7.

And that was it for my points. Though I was almost zeroed out, I unregistered both tourney entries and had $430 in T$, which was just as good as cash because they can be spent on SnGs.

So for roughly the cost of what I would’ve spent for the $285 bonus, I used the points for a $430 win.

Much better than $285. And I don’t have to work it off.

Now to win some SnGs with that $430…

(Later, I found out Stars will bump you to Gold Star briefly in order to purchase the $285 bonus. Good thing I didn’t know that, or else I wouldn’t have tried the better valued tournaments.)