Time flys

It has been over 3 years since I posted here and I have to blame a lot of it on my sheer lack of poker playing. Although I had never really intended this blog to be only about poker, it appears that when the poker stopped, so did the blogging.

To drive the final nail in the coffin and all that, I decided to revisit online poker playing last week and sure enough the urge to blog about it came with - the proof being this entry right here.

Given the challenge of getting money into poker sites now days I finally figured out the trick and used the eCheck mechanism that Pokerstars supports. My original intent was to use a check from one of my Canadian accounts but I discovered that Pokerstars assumes that if you live in the US, you would only have checks from US accounts. They are wrong but after a conversation with support, I realized that this was too difficult a thing to ask of them. They do support checks from Canadian banks if you live in Canada tho. :P

So last week I managed to get $100 into my Pokerstars account (which is the max you can write your first eCheck for) and decided to get back into the game. I had always liked S&Gs, so I tried a couple of a format I hadn't seen before. They are called Double or Nothing - basically 10 person S&Gs where the top 5 win double the entry (minus the rake). I found I had mixed success with these - people actually played quite tight (which was surprising) and I lost more than I won.

I then moved on to cash games - given my big bankroll I decided 0.10/0.25 NL was a good place for me to start. I put a few hours into this over a couple days and managed to eek out about $7/hr which I guess is pretty good given the limits I was playing at. It was fun at any rate.

Yesterday I decided to try one of the larger tournaments. They didn't have addons or rebuys but they had what they called extended registration which is really just rebuys by another name. Registration stayed open for an hour and you could reenter as often as you wanted. This took us from about 2100 original players to a total of 4791 when the first hour was up. I don't remember the numbers after that but by the end of 3 hrs I was in the money with 720 people left. After 4 hours we were under 100 players and I had actually been as high as 12th place at one time. During that 5th hour it was obvious my luck was running cold at the wrong time. I couldn't get any cards and the blinds were now in the 3k/6k to the 5k/10k range. I went out in 51st place at about 4hrs 40mins.

It was kind of neat to play the bigger tournament, especially when you are winning. It turned out that 51st place was worth $8.86. The tournament after all had only cost $1.10 to play. ;-)

By the sounds of it I am back playing poker, slowly, and back writing my blog.. Slowly..