Slow weekend

Not much exciting on the poker front this weekend. Played some $0.25/$0.50 6-max NL at CD Poker in an effort to clear some of the enormous bonus I have pending. They sent me a 60% to $720 reload offer a few weeks ago. I had some money just setting in my Neteller account, so I put $1000 in on the bonus offer. That gave me a $600 bonus. I'm not sure if I overlooked some of the fine print or what, but a couple days later another $750 bonus showed up in my account. So I've got $1350 in pending bonus.

Unfortunately, it clears at such a slow rate that if I was 4-tabling $2/$4 eight hours a day for the next three months I seriously doubt I could clear it all. Of course, this would require there to actually be four tables of $2/$4 going. Plus, CD Poker is not compatible with Poker Tracker, so 4-tabling becomes much more of a challenge.

So far I've just been playing one table and at a limit with which I'm comfortable. The play at the NL tables seems a lot less disciplined than at the limit tables, so I've been sticking with NL. I'm up a bit, maybe $50, on play, so it hasn't been time completely wasted, but after several hours of play I'm still a couple hours away from clearing the first $10 of bonus.

The carrot of $1350 bonus is hard to resist, but this is starting to look nearly impossible to clear. Even if I'd been playing here a lot over the last few months and was at their highest VIP level, it would still be extremely difficult to clear. With several of the Cryptos changing their bonus terms to be much more favorable to the player, I'm thinking my time is best spent elsewhere. (William Hill increased their bonus to £10/hour for this month. If you have an account there and haven't done the bonus this month, it's well worth your time to do so.)

I also spent more time at the Razz tables. This game depends very heavily on you getting cards. Fortunately, there are still enough fish playing this game that you can be card dead for an hour and make it all back in one hand. I was at a table at Full Tilt last night with some people who clearly had no clue what they were doing. As I watched one guy's play I was almost positive he thought he was playing stud high. I mean, how do you raise into someone showing 53 when you're showing two face cards?

Which brings up another topic that still mystifies me. There was one guy at the table last night who was extremely aggressive. If he was in a pot, he was raising. And he seemed to have no idea how to read other people's hands. Several times it was obvious to me he had effectively no chance of winning, yet he was still raising at every opportunity. Just the kind of guy you want playing when you've got a great hand.

Yet some idiot at the table insists on deriding the guy for raising all the time. It takes a special kind of stupid to type anything but encouragement to a player like this. Here's the one in a hundred (in this case maybe thousand) player who has virtually no clue what he's doing, but he doesn't let that stop him from tossing chips in the pot. He's the player around whom poker dreams are formed. And some moron has to stroke his own ego by making fun of the guy. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Never, under any circumstances, make a negative comment to a player like this. There is absolutely no upside for you in doing so.

In this case I did something that was almost as stupid. I told the moron to shut up. He'd either gotten it out of his system or realized the error of his ways, and he did what I suggested, but the damage had already been done. Mr. I-Always-Raise stopped raising at every opportunity and stopped playing every hand where his first card wasn't a face card. The golden goose had been slayed. Nice work jackass.

On the blogger tournament schedule this week we have Mondays At The Hoy, tonight at 22:00 at PokerStars, password hammer. Tomorrow, Tuesday, it's the WWdN, 20:30 at PokerStars, password monkey. Wednesday it's The Mookie, 22:00 at Full Tilt, password vegas1. And Thursday it's WWdN: Not The, 22:30 at PokerStars, password monkey. Please join us if you can.