Chris Halverson’s Blog

Empire Sucks

In case you haven’t heard, Empire took away the $500 match bonus. I saw a couple other bloggers mention it, then I checked out 2+2 and everybody said they took the bonus away. I couldn’t believe they would actually do that, so I logged into my Empire account and saw that they took away the bonus (it’s now marked as “Elapsed”).

Nice. Thanks Empire. Eff You. I understand that they evidently made a mistake, but what a way to piss off a bunch of players who actually play a lot. The main people who took advantage (and yes, I conceed that we took advantage of it) are the hard core players. I’m pissed, but at least now I can go about a more leisurely route and clear my 1000 hands at Party and not feel rushed. I see they did give me the HOTSEP bonus and released that, so that is $50 which basically brings me back to even. I’m still pissed.

Update: Party is fighting back. Gotta love it! They are offering a reload bonus (legit, on the popup before the login) for 20% up to $100, which means if you take the $500 from Empire and move it to Party you get another $100. Coincidence? I think not Smart move Party.

Action Poker

Editor’s Note: This was written before I found out my bonus had been taken away. I leave it here for information sake and in case anybody has any resources to point to short handed play.

Due to the plethora of bonuses out there, and my relatively short window of opportunity to clear them (the bonus have to be cleared in 30 days and I start class again next week), I did something I have never done before: I played the 1/2 6max tables.

Wow, talk about poker for action junkies.

In order to clear the Empire and Party bonuses I decided I was going to drop back to 1/2 and just hammer them out. I forgot that there are only about 3 full 1/2 tables and about 100 6max. Well, I’ve got 3500 raked hands I need to clear out, so 6 max is probably the best (read quickest) way to do it. I three tabled for a while before I about lost my mind. Wow, talk about quick. The variance here is pretty large, and last night didn’t go too well overall. Overall I was down for the night and I haven’t had a chance to look over my play, but then again, I don’t know what to look for at these short tables.

I’m figuring the general strategy has to change a bit. Virtually any A and potentially any paint and decent kicker is good to see the flop if you can do so for cheap. Maybe? I don’t know. I do know that my percentage of flops see was about double what it normally was, which probably makes sense. I am just not sure of the “correct” strategy here.

I’ll probably stick with this for a bit as I did clear 10% of the bonus in one night that was broken up a couple of times to spend time with my family (including playing with BadBlood even though I didn’t get an invite to Al’s party ). I’m going to try to find some info on playing these action games to see if I can’t make some money here. The play was generally pretty bad, I just couldn’t connect with much.

I think another reason things potentially did not go well was that I moved down a level and I kept thinking, “it’s only $2″. When the stakes are half of what you’re used to, it’s easy to just go along with it and see what happens. I am positive that cost me quite a bit and it’s something I will have to pay attention to in the future. I have to just think “it’s one chip” and separate the chips from the money otherwise I’ll be way too loose.

1997 WSOP

ESPN Classic’s show last night was the 1997 WSOP. This one featured a final table that was held outdoors on Freemont Street. The commentators (Gabe Kaplan again) went on about how hot it was, even in the shade, they even had misters going over the stands to keep people cool. It was also very windy and the players had to make sure to protect their cards just from the wind. I’m not sure what they were thinking about having it outside, but it was interesting.

The final table brought us a legend, Stu Ungar was going for his third title. He basically destroyed everybody. It was pretty incredible. He had the chip lead going into the final table and was never close to losing it. Of course, this was a 1 hour show with a lot of filler, so they didn’t show many hands, but it was scary how well he could read people. Gabe Kaplan did an interview with him and he seemed like a nice guy and was actually pretty funny and outgoing. During the show, they took a break in the tournament and Gabe and guest commentator Phil Hellmuth called him over (you could hear Kaplan yelling “Hey Stuey!”). This is in the middle of the tournament and Ungar had just looked into another guy’s soul and knew he would win the hand. They asked him about his call and he just laughed and talked about his read on the guy. In the middle of the tournament, with the commentator stand about ten feet from the table with the other competitors still hanging around. He was laughing and everything. It’s too bad that he was so self-destructive, just think what he would be doing now with poker as popular as it is now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2004 at 9:34 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.