Online Poker

I finally made the Royal Flush Club on Empire Poker!  One last marathon session yesterday made sure I reached the giddy heights of their top tier - and earned the right to the promised $100/month no-strings deposit bonus.

I didn't expect fireworks, but I was hoping for something to mark the occasion.  A congratulatory email, perhaps (with details of how I get my free money, preferably).  There's been nothing yet.  But I definitely made it:

Played 33, cashed in 7.  The in-the-money results were far from spectacular though, and if it wasn't for a 3rd place finish in a 60-man $30 tournament, which landed me $371, I'd have wiped out almost all of the good work I did last time.

As it is, I ended up down $226, which is offset slightly by $25 cash back from redeeming the points I earned.  I paid $67 in tournament fees, so that's a reasonable rakeback rate (37%), but that's only the case when you play dozens of tournaments on the same day (because of the "number of tournaments squared" rule for bonus points) .  Otherwise it's virtually worthless.

I can live with that result given the luck I had, and knowing that one or two results going slightly differently could have turned things right around.  I bubbled in a satellite for a $172 seat, and my session ended with aces getting predictably cracked.

I open-pushed, got called by ace-jack and the harmless king-high flop turned to disaster with a ten on the turn and a devastating queen on the river.

Pretty standard.

The other nine times out of ten, I'd have been sitting on a stack virtually guaranteed to make the money ($90+) and in good shape to fight for the top prizes.

Anyway. hit me with that deposit bonus Empire Poker...

I signed up to chipmeup.com a couple of weeks ago.  This is a site where you can buy and sell small pieces of action in poker tournaments.

It's a bit like what I already do with some of the live tournaments I play, but it's running around the clock and you can buy shares for anything upwards of a dollar, mostly for online poker.

I have had mixed success so far backing players, but tonight it's my turn to hold my hand out asking for money.  I'm playing two tournaments on PokerStars: the Sunday Warm-Up ($215) and the Daily Eighty Grand ($55) - although the Eighty Grand is actually guaranteed at $125,000 today.

I offered half of my action in the $55 tournament and it sold out in minutes.  So I decided to go for something a bit more ambitious and have listed 75% of the $215.  I'll still play this regardless of how many shares I sell, but if you want a piece head over to http://chipmeup.pokernews.com/players/show/3874 and snap one up.

Or contact me directly if you can't be bothered to set up an account at chipmeup.com.  To say that their web site could benefit from a usability study is an understatement, but if you can get past that (to be honest, it took me a few attempts) the underlying service is really rather good.

Live updates (click graphs for more details):

EDIT: Sunday Million, finished 890th from 4069 runners.  Went out with the best hand (A5 vs 95) obv.

EDIT: Eighty Grand, finished 45th from 4460 runners.  Bit better :)  Won $401.40, of which 40% goes to my backers.

I've been needing a reliable way to get up in the morning, as various combinations of three alarm clocks placed strategically around the bedroom just wasn't working as effectively as it should.  You can only blame jet lag for about a week, after that I wasn't even fooling myself.

I may have found an answer: pre-register for an online poker tournament before going to bed.

I bought in to a tourney starting at 8:20am, set an alarm for fifteen minutes before and it turned out to be totally unnecessary.  I was bizarrely wide awake just before it started ringing.

How does this work then?  The prospect of knowing that if I oversleep I'll struggle to get going before lunch and then be playing catchup all day hasn't been enough to get me going before 10am so far this month.  But the thought at the back of my mind that I might not be able to play every single hand in a $20 poker game if I'm not up on time apparently does the trick.

So why put myself through this ordeal, and on a Sunday morning too?

Quite a while ago I looked at the Empire Poker VIP Club and thought it looked like a good deal for tournament players, providing you can play quite a few tournaments all in one sitting.  Their points are awarded one per dollar of entry fees, plus a bonus amount equal to the square of the number of tournaments you play in a day.

So if you play one $10+$1 tournament, you get 1 base point and 1 bonus point.  If you play ten of the same, you get 10 base points but 100 bonus points.  It gets to the point where the value of the tournaments doesn't matter, it's all about the volume.  It can be quite a significant bonus if you're prepared to concentrate your play to the extreme.

Compare this to cash game players, who are awarded points equal to the square root of the number of hands they play each day.  So you get 1 point for your first hand, then it takes 3 more hands for the next point, then 5 more, 7 more, 9 more and so on.  Seems like a funny way to reward loyalty to me if the more you play the harder it is to get something back.

Anyway, this seemed like a great way to reach the top tier of the loyalty program, and the attraction of that was a $100 monthly deposit bonus with no play requirement.  $1200 a year just for moving your money around?  Yes please!

So having a marathon day every now and again to help achieve this status was once part of my master plan.  It seems I just forgot about the plan as the last time I did this was almost a year ago.  The end is in sight now though, so you never know...

I'm hoping to play 40 tournaments today.  Results will follow, unless I can find a way to graph it and then a graph will follow

10:30 - There's no better display of awesome poker skill than to take down a stupidly fast tournament.  Officially I have the 1st place in a $30+$3 turbo after we agreed a chip count deal.  I walked away with $432.89, which is enough to cover my buyins until at least 3pm.

10:55 - Runner up in a satellite.  4th place pays $7.60.  It cost $11.

12:15 - 3rd in a 30-player $20 limit tournament for $120.  Would have been at least 2nd if not for a miracle comeback by a player with 0.2BBs.  LOL donkaments, etc.

12:30 - Scraped 3rd in a $22 shootout after making an awesome call with Q2 and sucking out on ace-rag, giving me $24.16 in the bank and entry into the next round.  Claire just brought me pizza, she is awesome obv.

13:00 - Choked in round 2 of the shootout.  Still, 4 cashes from 9 results (and 3 games still in progress, 1 final table 3 from money) for +$298 is running pretty good.

13:20 - Bubble boy

15:45 - Scraped into money in a $44 tournament with 10 paid, then made it to 8th place for $144.

18:30 - Won $177.75 for 15th place in a $30 rebuy tournament.  I didn't rebuy or add-on.

18:40 - 42nd when 40 get paid.  Basically bubbled again.

19:40 - 9th place got me $83.20 in a $22 tourney.  That would be $366.60 up on the day if I stopped now.  But I've only played 29...!

21:15 - 15th in a 331 man turbo for $33.10

21:20 - A bottom level cash in a $33 tournament for $54.60.  Currently up $371.30 with 2 games still running.

21:40 - Down to playing only one table for the first time since I started, over 13 hours ago.  My brain hurts a bit.

23:25 - I am heads up at the end of a $22 Omaha Hi/Lo tournament with 68 runners.  Not bad for someone who hasn't really got a clue how to play that game.  He has a 9:1 chip lead so I figure I'm almost certainly getting 2nd place for $272.

02:05 - Got to round three of a $22 shootout, winning $43.31 and $46.20.  One more tournament (number 40) is still running, and I'm going to play it like I want to go to bed.  Because I do.  I've been playing online poker for nearly 18 hours.  So assume it's all over.

This will have earned me 1,668 VIP points, which is worth $33 in real money (equivalent to almost 50% rakeback - I paid $68 in fees today) and puts me just 1,118 points away from the Royal Flush Club - so it won't have to be quite such a marathon next time.  33 tournaments should do it..!

(Note: To earn 1,668 VIP points in a day playing ring games would have needed me to play nearly 2.8 million hands).

Not a bad result at all really: 11 cashes from 40 is pretty phenominal (and obviously unmaintainable) and $601.81 is a very nice chunk of profit.  Sometimes I do run good.

03:45 - What do you get if you cross woohoo with zzzzz?  I cashed in the last tournament for $88 but there's no way I'm going to be awake at 8am again...

I can rarely resist trying to steal the blinds when there's extra dead money in the pot from a player who posts out of position.

However when there are two posters and you're playing limit hold'em, I'm not sure exactly how profitable it can be to make a one-bet bluff into that kind of field.

All of the other players should be able to call one extra bet with pretty much any old crud when facing at least 5.5-1 pot odds.  After all, if they don't like gambling, you'd think they'd wait for their big blind.

I still couldn't resist having a stab when this situation came up though, and it only bloody worked.

It's not the most spectacular hand history in the world ever, but I liked it.

iPoker Network Limit Hold'em $2.00/$4.00 (10 handed)

Preflop: Hero is Button with K 2
SB posts $1.00, BB posts $2.00, MP3 posts $2.00, CO posts $2.00
5 folds, MP3 checks, CO checks, Hero raises to $4.00, SB folds, BB folds, MP3 folds, CO folds

Total pot: $11.00

I thought I'd have a nice little piece to write about some seriously profitable bonus abusing.  Instead, it's turned into a rant about me almost getting robbed by ECash Direct.  Allegedly.

I'd hoped the focus of the post would be about just how many magazines I'd bought this month to take advantage of a promotion by paysafecard (yes, it's all lower case) that matched every £10 voucher you bought with another £10.

Foolishly, they had launched this offer without any restriction on the number of times any one person could use it.  You don't need to give any personal details to buy a voucher, or to redeem a voucher.  All they seem to have done is to crudely banhammered my IP addresses so that I can't ever deposit using paysafecard from home again.

That's OK, I'm pretty resourceful.

However, I'm sure you'd agree that any chance of being blocked from redeeming the vouchers you buy does introduce an element of risk to the paysafe system.  I did a batch of these on my mobile phone, so anyone else trying to deposit through T-Mobile's web proxy will be shit out of luck.

Every copy of Poker Player and Inside Poker this month carried the £10 bonus.  Poker Player costs £2.50 and Inside Poker is £3, so that means every magazine you buy is worth at least £7.

When I go shopping, I shop like a man.  No messing about.  I came back with a total of 154 magazines.

Don't believe me?  Feel free to count.

I worked out the value of all this merchandise, after taking into account a few discount coupons and the cost of carrier bags at WH Smith, to be £1149.81 in my favour.

Certainly worth a couple of tanks of petrol and a few hours driving around to get them.

Hitting the major shopping centres and train stations is definitely the way to go: Manchester Arndale was a goldmine (30 mags) with Birmingham New Street an honourable second (24 mags).

While what I've been doing is clearly not within the spirit of the promotion it is certainly not against the rules.  I found an edge, and by jove I was going to maximise it.

I redeemed 25 paysafe vouchers at Dusk Till Dawn Poker.  That's £250 of my own money and £250 matched with the magazine bonuses.  I tried my best to give them some action, but Cryptologic network is on its last legs (the last few remaining operators are actually moving to Boss Media in January) so it was a real struggle.  I played a bit, lost a bit then attempted to cash out.

I'd used my DTD account only once before, to pre-register for their opening night tournament.  My debit card had since expired so I called up ECash - the payment processor shared by all Cryptologic poker sites - to see how I could make a withdrawl.  Easy peasy, they said.  Just make a minimum deposit on the new card, then you can cash out the whole lot.

If only it was that easy.  I also needed to print and sign a form authorising that debit card transaction, and send them a copy of the card and a copy of my photo ID.

That's not a big deal really, this happens a lot.  But usually once you complete the ID check that's the end of it.  Then you can get at your money again.

The ID check was fine, but then they told me "your account is currently undergoing a deeper poker investigation that was issued by the DTD management".

This, I have since discovered, is complete horse shit.

I spoke to a manager at the Dusk Till Dawn club this evening who was extremely helpful, despite this not really being his problem.  He told me - as I suspected from the cracks that had begun to show in the yarns that ECash kept spinning me - that DTD would not ask for an account to be closed or investigated.

"That would always come from ECash", he said and confirmed that DTD did not carry out any investigations themselves.

He went to make a few calls and just minutes later my account was back online and all the money was there.

I can't be bothered to compile and publish all their emails (most of it says the same thing over and over again anyway) but here's the gist: ECash lie.

By email they told me:

This account will remain closed as it is being investigated by DTD, we can't intervene until we have news from them.

Unfortunately, the DTD dedicated investigation team is not an internal department, nor does it operate in conjunction to our (or their) call centre.

However when I spoke to a supervisor at ECash he told me he had spoken to the security team, who were "just around the corner from my desk".

I don't actually know which is the fib - that they are in the same building or that they are not an internal department - because I wasn't able to speak to someome else who was apparently right next door, and he gave me an email address: fraudinvestigations@ecashdirect.co.uk.  So that's for DTD and nothing to do with ECash, is it?

They kept hammering on about not being able to do anything until DTD say so, yet DTD knew nothing about it until I called them.

So why?  Well, I have a wild conspiracy theory.

When the Cryptologic network deals its last hand next month, ECash Direct may very well cease to exist too.  If my account is closed and therefore not migrated to Boss Media (who use a different payment processor) what chance would I have of getting at that money?  It could "just disappear" very easily.

I just can't think of another logical explanation that makes any sense.

Sure, I abused a promotion.  But the victim was not DTD Poker or ECash, it was paysafecard.  It might have cost them a few quid in fees, in which case just make me generate a bit more rake before I can withdraw it.  Don't call me a cheater and try to steal my money.

Did I collude or chip dump?  Of course not.  Their "deeper poker investigation" should not have taken long to see this either.  I counted my hand histories and I'd played one turbo sit-and-go and 173 ring game hands, mostly nitting it up at $1/$2 fixed limit.  It's going to take a while to dump off £500 at those limits.

The whole time, I couldn't get any explanation about what exactly was being investigated.  On the phone they told me it was most likely a "random security check".  How many poker sites do you know that randomly close their players' accounts?

All I wanted to know was what they were looking for and how long it would take them to check it out.  They wouldn't say so directly, but they were accusing me of something illegal.  I felt dirty. 

Bonus whoring should never make you feel dirty.

Anyway, if you want a copy of this month's Poker Player or Inside Poker, just ask.  I have a few to spare...

It started out like this:

Seat 3: luckydonut (10336 in chips)
Seat 7: supra23 (3164 in chips)
Dealt to luckydonut [Ks Td]

I had been stealing his blind quite aggressively since we'd been heads up and I was in good shape to take the victory.

In chip equity alone, I was worth $20 and change of the $27 left to play, and so far he was letting me roll him over.  KTo here meant I was about to make another easy all-in move.

supra23 said, "ill pay you $30 to fold to me"
luckydonut said, "lol"
supra23 said, "no really"
luckydonut said, "why?"
supra23 said, "i just want the battle of the planetsp points"
supra23 said, "ill give you the first place money"
supra23 said, "i just want the first place points"

I stalled the game while we talked about it and eventually I timed out and folded on my massive king-ten.

I asked for $10 up front, which he sent, then I clicked "sit out".  The extra $17 arrived after he took first place.

But is this allowed?  I really have no idea.

Poker Stars haven't contacted me about it yet, and their software much be able to detect this kind of dumping - especially if two player-to-player transfers take place between the last two players in a tournament.

There were only two of us left in the tournament and we made a deal that we both agreed on.  He got the leaderboard points he wanted and I locked in a win without any further risk.  We're both winners, aren't we?

To stand a chance of making the leaderboard myself I was going to need at least 4 first place finishes in my next 8 games.  So did I think that $7 in the hand was worth more than 18 league points in the bush?  (Remember, I was still getting 27 points for 2nd place).

Absolutely yes.

However it's the other players who are competing for the same leaderboard that are disadvantaged by us agreeing to engineer his way up the league table.  That's why, looking back, I think our deal could have been on dodgy ground.

So I was keen to check last week's leaderboards as soon as they were final to see how well supra23 did.  If he'd pipped another player by 18 points or less, there's a chance (albeit a very, very small one) I might have felt responsible.

In fact it didn't actually make any difference.  20 places are paid but Poker Stars lists the top 100 and his name was nowhere to be seen.

Beats me why someone would go to that effort to buy a small number of points if they weren't already in with a shot of one of the top places.

This was in an affiliate communication from PokerStars that landed today.

Using "PokerStars" within Domain Names

PokerStars does not permit its affiliates to use the term PokerStars or any of our trademarks (such as SundayMillion, EPT, LAPT, APPT, etc) in any domain used to send players to us. Any affiliate found doing so will be required to transfer the domain to us.

If you do own a domain containing any of our trademarks, please login to your registrar and unlock the domain which needs to be transferred. You should then send us the authorization code. We will then initiate the transfer and pay the transfer cost associated with this. Continued practice will cause the affiliate to be subject to termination and payments suspended. Please help us with this issue by either handing your domain/s over or reporting any such domains to us.

It must be the most feeble attempt to seize domain names ever.

In fact I can't see this having a great deal of impact, other than providing cut-throat affiliates with an easy way to eliminate the competition: simply purchase an anonymous domain registration for something like notpokerstars.com and put the other guy's linking code on the page, then snitch.

I'm such a sucker for a tiered loyalty program.

The number of turbo sit-and-gos I play on Poker Stars each month tends to mean that I can just about retain SilverStar, and if I'm running a little short of points as the end of the month approaches I'll make an effort to play a bit more in order to keep that precious status.

I don't know why I bother really.   I worked out the actual value of doing this is about $12 per month.

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The benefit of SilverStar (1500 base points per month) over BronzeStar (no qualification required) is that your FPPs (the points you can spend, not the VIP points that determine your status) accumulate 50% faster at the higher level.  Once you have that level you keep it right through to the end of the following month.

So the difference between earning your first 1500 points in month as a BronzeStar player vs SilverStar is 750 FPPs.  One FPP is worth about 1.6 cents, so those extra points are worth about $12.

</show working>

Like I said, I'm a sucker for it.  But you know that without people like me these schemes just wouldn't exist.

I do wish I hadn't bothered going out of my way to keep my status at the end of last month though.

PokerStars are currently running an promotion where you get a bonus if you increase your VIP level this month.

If you upgrade from bronze to silver, you get $50, so if I'd actually dropped back to BronzeStar last month this would be an easy $50 for not really any more play than I'd usually put in.  Much better than the $12 worth of player points from maintaining that level.

But now I need to bypass silver (1,500 points) and get to gold (4,000 points) for a $100 bonus.

It's not even real money, it's a bonus in your poker account that you then have to earn 7x the dollar amount in points to unlock.  But the thing is, I just can't say no.

$100 for free, and all I have to do is play about two and a half times as much as normal, and then make sure I play again next month too?  Sure, sign me up.

Well, I started off thinking that's how it was going to be, probably looking at 3-4 hours a day to stay on top of it, but Claire convinced me I should take the opportunity to move up levels (which will earn points twice as fast, so I don't have to play for as long).

I was some way off the latest win goals I'd set myself before taking another shot at the next level, but in the absense of having the stats to back up a decision it does help to have someone to blame if it all goes wrong. So I'm going to go for it.

I never wrote about what happened last time I tried this though.

Everyone loves a graph, and this one has even been annotated to add trend lines as I saw fit.  You can even click on it for a high def version.  You lucky, lucky people.

This is my entire PokerStars single-table SNG history for 2008 so far (apart from steps, which can't be measured the same way).

I've marked four zones on the graph.  Starting from the left, the first section is all $16 tournaments, and I was winning.  Then I moved up to the $27s and crashed and burned.  Next, I dropped back down to the $16s but played 6 at a time instead of the 4 I was used to, where I carried on losing - albeit slightly slower.  Finally I dropped back down to 4-tabling and things seem to have settled back down to how they used to be.

I'd only given myself $500 to play with at the higher level, which lasted just over 200 tournaments.  That isn't really enough to know for sure whether I was getting killed by the game or I was just running bad.  I'm still optimistic that it was the latter, but the downward trend seems pretty consistent after the initial spike.

The thing that really stands out when I look at those results is the number of times I cashed for the least possible money.

Overall I finished in the money almost as often as I did with the $16s (38% vs 40%) but on the $27s I had more 3rd place finishes than the total of my 1sts and 2nds put together!  With 1st paying two and a half times as much as 3rd, that's going to make quite a difference to my overall return, and I'll need to watch closely this time around to try to see if there's a reason I'm a habitual bronze medalist.

What surprised me most though was the difference between my results on the $16s when 6-tabling versus 4-tabling.

I really didn't think I'd be giving up too much by playing two more tables - hoping, eventually, to be able to move up to 8 or more tables at a time and increase my volume before increasing my stake.  I accepted I might not win as quickly if my concentration was being spread thinner, but I certainly didn't expect to suddenly be losing money at the same rate I used to be winning it.

The reason I dropped right back to four $16s at a time was to see if I'd still got what it takes to beat that game.  It's not a huge sample size (which is why I was hesitant to move up just yet) but things seemed to change almost instantly.  The graph appears to be going in the right direction and the last magenta line is virtually the same gradient as the first one.

So I don't think I'm broken, but apparently four tables is as many as I can handle.

Anyway, the heat is on and the time is right for me to play my game.  Going for gold, four-tabling the $27s.  Watch this space.

Claire got this email from Paradise Poker trying to tempt her back to play, which almost certainly won't work unless they bin the horrible Boss Media network and reinstate their kitchy old software with food and drink at the table and flaming cards when you hit a high hand.

Personal greeting - fail.  The broken images are a nice touch too.  Good effort.

Still, at least they want her back I guess.  I haven't had a sausage.

Poker Stars was offline for a while earlier today.

Could it have been because they were installing these special spooky avatars into the lobby, in place of where they normally show a handful of sponsored pros and last week's leaderboard winner?

Neteller launched its new prepaid MasterCard product "Net+" today.

At least, I think that's what it is.  This part of their blurb isn't exactly clear:

So it's a prepaid card that you don't have to pre-load.  That would be free money then?

I think the idea is that it actually takes money straight out of your Neteller account - an idea that I'm far from keen on, given that this type of payment card has absolutely no consumer protection whatsoever.  I really wouldn't want my entire balance to be in play on those terms.

A real bank would call this a debit card; they'd also let you dispute unauthorised transactions and your balance would be protected if the institution went busto. (Compare Net+ terms 2.5 and 4.13).

However most of what I've read so far is so badly written and confusing I really couldn't say with any confidence exactly what is going on.

This is definitely the replacement for the old Altair card though, which is being phased out.  That one lasted just over a year.

In theory it's is a good move, because if Neteller are dealing with both the e-wallet and the payment card, you only have to deal with one make-believe bank instead of two when you want to spend your money.

I've used my Altair card take some actual US dollars out of my Neteller US dollar account, from an ATM in America.  This is just about the only way to do such a radical thing.

Neteller will keep your balance in dollars, but you can't take your dollars out without switching currencies, allowing them to use the exchange rate of their choice to cut you a cheque in pounds.

If you take a bank wire, the amount is converted from dollars to euros first at god-knows-what rate.  Then, unless you have a bank account in euros, it'll be converted again by your bank when it lands at god-knows-what rate, plus god-knows-what additional charges.

The last time I tried to withdraw to my US Dollar bank account, I ended up losing $112 on a $3000 cashout.  I got that back eventually after complaining a few times, but they told me not to expect the same treatment again and that I would have to live with the unnecessary double currency conversion.

To make things even better, the charges for not being able to withdraw your own money the way you want also went up earlier this year.  It's now $10 for either a bank wire in the wrong currency, or a cheque in the wrong currency.  Both used to be just $1.

Of course, now that Neteller operate their own payment card, the fees on that have gone up too.  Altair charged $4 for an ATM withdrawal; the Net+ charge is $6.

The thing that really takes the piss though is the new $3 "dormant account" charge, applied monthly if you don't use the card.  If it's like I suspect, you can't just run your prepaid card into the ground and throw it away - this fee will come straight out of your Neteller account every month unless you cancel the card.  Which costs $20.

Anyway, I sort of saw this coming because at the end of September my old card expired and I asked Altair for a replacement.  No can do, they said:

I am sorry, but at this time we will not re-issue you a new Altair Card.  Our joint card programme with NETELLER has ended, and they have a new card offering for you.

The word "not" was indeed underlined as well as in bold type for emphasis.  But you know I've never noticed before that NETELLER is indeed officially written in all-caps.  That's not for emphasis, it's just their name.  The same thing goes NEOVIA, the awkward and instantly forgettable new name for their company, apparently.

Whatever.  They barely deserve one capital leter, never mind all of those.

I feared what money I had left on the card, all $33 of it, would be dead.  I snoozed, I lost.  However, despite their corporate bitterness Altair still offered:

If you would like a refund, we can send out a cheque to you, or if you would like your funds credited back into your NETELLER account please contact the NETELLER Card services team.

This I did.  Can you guess what Neteller said?

Unfortunately you will need to contact Altair for your funds thank you we do apologize for the inconvenience.

I asked a second time for good measure.

The funds is with Altair so it cannot transfer back to NETELLER we do apologize for the inconvenience thank you.

A real bank would be able to do something as complex as transferring money from one account to another.  How naive of me to forget who I was dealing with.

I got my cheque in the end - in pounds of course.  This shows just how impressive a financial instituion Altair was, to complement Neteller's aspirations of greatness.  Hand-written cheque, number 23.

I'm considering printing out this screenshot and framing it as a reminder that, occasionally, when your dominating ace-king gets called by either a weaker ace or total garbage, it doesn't necessarily lose.  In this case, both types of hands had a crack - and didn't make it.  Yippee!

I think my Poker Tracker just broke.

I'm fairly sure that (a) I haven't actually lost ninety two grand in one day and (b) that I wouldn't need a computer program to tell me I was struggling to beat the game if I was spewing at a rate of $26 per hand.

That's an impressive loss rate - more than four big bets per hand at $3/$6 limit, which is apparently where these hands all came from (despite me not having played that limit on Poker Stars for over a year!).

If you lost that much money every hundred hands, you'd have a pretty big leak.  But every hand?  You'd have to try really hard.  Like bet and raise on every street, hope someone else comes along for the ride and then fold, giving up a huge pot for a single bet on the river.  Every time.

Actually I guess it could be pretty easy if the other players are paying attention, but any poker site worth their salt would pick up this betting pattern and flag you as a chip dumper before you can say "I cap it!".

This wasn't me, I swear.

God alone knows what's happened, but I think I probably need to reload my database.

I'd played dozens of step tournaments to get this far and this was my first shot at getting something out of the system: I'd made it to Step 4 of a Poker Stars WCOOP Satellite.

With steps, you're never done until you either win a top prize or lose.  However unlike most of the live event satellites, the WCOOP Steps offers a choice of routes, some of which are much more achievable.

Instead of being stuck on a path that takes 6 steps to win your way into a $5,200 package ($7.50, $27, $82, $215, $700 and $2100) you can branch out at Step 3 or 4 to play directly for a $330 or $530 tournament seat.

I'd decided to go for the $530 route, with the intention of unregistering and keeping the W$ value for future speculation - or possibly towards buying into smaller WSOP or EPT events - should I get there.

In a 9 handed Step 4 sit-and-go worth $215 to enter, 3 players win a $530 seat and 1 gets $210 cash.  Everyone else leaves with nothing.

In fact, from WCOOP Step 3 onwards there's no backtracking.  You can't fall back to Step 2, only repeat the same level, move forward or lose completely.  This structure is designed to attract higher stakes players to buy in directly at the $82 and $215 levels.  It seems to work, and it can make these games pretty tough.

Anyway enough suspense.  My first crack at Step 4 was a terrific victory and will surely be an inspriation for other weak-tighties playing way out of their comfort zone.

I played like a rock, as did just about everyone else.  For example, how often do you see AJ check behind on the river with a board of TT7AA and a flush possible?  You really think the only hand that calls a bet there is pocket tens?

Then with just T1460 left in chips and facing a T300 big blind next hand, something beautiful happened.  Two monster hands and a big stack who felt like taking a crack.

The double bust out threw me into the top 3 and a seat to Sunday's $3m guaranteed event, apparently.  The first time I've ever made it out of a Step series alive!

It took about 1.5 seconds before I'd unregistered and was counting my W$.

It's been five weeks since I played online poker, and I'd missed those sweet green clubs and blue diamonds so much.

Not to mention the "so sick" suckouts on PokerStars that conspiracy theorists love so much.  Of course it's rigged.  They're watching you too.

In my first sit-and-go back (actually I played six at a time, but it was top left on my screen as well as the first one where I had a hand of note) I ran my pocket kings into pocket queens, getting it all in on a low paired board, with an inevitable queen on the river.

Down to 75 chips, I doubled up thanks to not really paying attention to my stack size (I limped for two thirds of my stack with JT, then got pot-committed before sucking out) then cracked aces myself with JJ and several miracles later ended up finishing in second place.

I'd forgotten how random this turbo poker malarky was.

I'm pretty out of practice at multi-tabling too and when I played 6 steps at the same time and ended up going deep in 5 of them, all hell broke loose.

I had pocked jacks somewhere, but somehow hit the "raise" button on a different table.

I've cried bullshit at being on the other end of a hand like this many times in the past.  Now it was my turn.

Preflop: Hero is BB with 8 3
1 fold, MP1 raises to 300.00, 2 folds, Button raises to 1870.00 (All-In), 1 fold, Hero calls 1094.00 (All-In), 1 fold

Flop: (2863.00) 9 4 8 (2 players, 2 all-in)

Turn: (2863.00) J (2 players, 2 all-in)

River: (2863.00) 7 (2 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: 2863.00 | Rake: 0.00

Button had A K (highest card, Ace)
Hero had 8 3 (one pair, eights)
Outcome: Hero won 2863.00