Poker Perambulation

Daniel Negreanu had a bit of a rant in his Full Contact blog. I don’t have a problem with his complaints about Foxwood and their setup, but…

If you check his blog, he is disturbed about the blinds and a couple of other things. Until the UIGEA his site was part of th Ongame network. Ongame has as bad a blind structure as you can find on the net. My final tables there have all been crapshoots. Let’s compare them to a better site. They are a couple of minutes faster than most. The fast blind structure in an article I did on blinds was the Ongame structure. It makes no use of antes and the progression doubles the small blind more frequently than with other sites. I understand the need to progress – especially with lower buyin tournaments – but they have very limited deep stack or slower blind structures in all but their very top tournaments – and those are crippled with the loss of U.S. Players.

Daniel doesn’t like the progression and Foxwood and I don’t like the one on his site. We’ll both survive. But, as a skin, he could have pressured for a slower play tournament and several levels at least once a day. As he says in his article, it makes for better poker. Why shouldn’t even the cheap seat player get at least one break a day?

Ongame has always ignored or penalized the lower end players. Their original SnG buyin was 5-1 and that is 20% juice. There cheapest ring blinds were .50-25 at NL, PL and Limit. That is hard on a starting player who wants to hone a game. To be fair, they are a site that allowed the juice to be used for bonus clearing. I was playing at PokerRoom early on and moved to Ultimate Bet when I learned there were better places to play SnG’s and MTT’s. But, UB doesn’t let you clear bonus with their juice. They don’t expire the bonus to their credit; but, that opens another can of worms when – every time you visit your cashier account – you see that lovely bonus money just sitting there. I’d let some friends use their money to clear the account with their higher limit play. Every one of them has lost money in the try. That seems to be a bonus money from hell account. LOL

Daniel certainly understands the business pressures in brick and mortar and online for the house to show a profit. The house has every right to get what the traffic will bear. Daniel ranted loudly at the table about the Foxwood structure and pointed out that doing it at the tables was no place to lodge his legitimate concerns. So, he blogged his frustration. Well, that goes both ways. Fortunately, you can look around for the best deals online. And, we all should.

There are sites with rakeback schemes that directly come to the player. PokerChamps (the first to ban U.S. Players) had one. And, you can get one today at TonyG. There is even a site that has no rake. I haven’t played there but it isn’t a top tier site for some reason. And, if I remember correctly, the Dutch Boyd site that stiffed everyone had rake free poker. The house is entitled to a profit for providing our games. But, there are things beyond rake they can do to make our online experience more enjoyable.

End of rant! I could go on about the onslaught of Turbos and Super Turbos but let’s save that for another day.

ADDENDUM:

There is an online petition against the UIGEA. It is easy and quick to sign. PLEASE! Take a few minutes to click on the above. It ask you name, email address, and ZIP. It allows a short comment. The address can be kept confidential or allowed for email purpose from the attorney sponsoring the petition.

If you have a not so savvy family member or friend and worry about them getting caught by a phishing scam, there is a solution. It is a plug-in for Firefox that checks all URLs going through Firefox for being a known phishing site. You can download it here.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 7:37 am and is filed under Journal, Misc., Poker Thoughts. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.