Bonus Whoring

There are arguments about how to clear a bonus quickly and with the least risk. The usual answer is multi-tabling a comfortable limit Hold’em game. I think I have found a much better way.

The typical site requires you to be in the hand to accumulate points. So, in the flop games it cost you a big blind as an ‘up front fee’ to participate in the raked hand. Fold and it is like you aren’t there.

I had bonus sitting on Ultimate Bet for some time. I wasn’t playing there and gave some friends access to the account to clear it. But there was about $50 left when they sent me the free $10. I’ve been playing HORSE and cleared about $30 at a .05-.10 table. I couldn’t believe such a table could clear bonus. It was hard enough doing it at higher limit Hold’em tables.

The secret is the Stud games. They have an ante which is a smaller portion of the small blind. This small amount means you participate in the rake for every hand. At that .05-.10 HORSE table it costs .02 in ante. The tables are normally fairly loose with a lot of limping and chasing that builds pots and rake. Ultimate Bet reports your point accumulation. That table defaults to a $5 buy-in. I’ll normally clear a 1.50 or more bonus in a session. That is a great risk:reward ratio for clearing bonus. With just 3/5 of the games at HORSE being ante games, it is even less than you can expect from a RAZZ or Stud only situation.

So, my advise to the bonus whore is to learn and play the stud type games. You participate in the rake for every hand. The quality of play is lower than the typical limit Hold’em table. It doesn’t take a huge investment of your time to get to be an above adequate player. With that level of expertise, you are better than most of those playing. The alternative poker games are getting popular. Lot of new HORSE players are testing the waters. I constantly see these players in hands with starting cards that a real stud player never would participate with. It isn’t hard to be a profitable player and get above average player points in the process.

You can Google any number of little tutorials on Stud, Stud8, and RAZZ. The definitive work for stud play is by Chip Reese in Doyle Brunson’s Super System or Super System II. If you can get down the idea of starting hands from that, you are likely to be one of the top players at the table. When the rest of what he talks about starts to fall into place you can make a very nice profit while clearing bonus. It appears the stud games are as soft at low and mid levels as the tables were when the Hold’em craze took off several years ago. And the HORSE tables seem weaker still.

ADDENDUM:

Poker Calculator is a Java application that gives odds. It is freeware and gives odds for all the poker flavors including the stud games mentioned above. It also runs simulations. You can get it here. It is a zip file that you can unpack into its own directory. There is no registration required and it does the same job with the same info that some of the shareware and pay to use applications provide. It is the only one I use.

Most of the sites don’t reveal stud cards in the order they were dealt for some reason. Of course, in B&M situations it is just as unlikely you get that info as people shuffle their down cards and they aren’t necessarily in the order dealt.

I was playing RAZZ on a site that sorted the cards. I had the wheel when I started raising and got a high card brick on the river. The hand was sorted with two high cards on the left. If you didn’t realize how it was shown, you might think I rivered a hand from starting with two bricks down. The guy with the 6-high went ballistic and used all the gutter adjectives in a very uninventive manner. I and other tried to explain it to him but he wasn’t having it. You need to know the other up cards and still can only extrapolate what someone’s down cards are. Just something to keep in mind when you decide to take up one of the stud games.