Party NL Blind Changes: Thank You!
As you may recall, at the beginning of the year, I had decided that my poker game had grown stagnant. I was playing just to play, but I was getting to the point where it wasn’t as enjoyable as it used to be. To help try to fix that, and because of some encouragement from
Being the bonus whore that I am (by necessity, I suck, so the extra money is good), I play at a lot of different sites on different networks. One thing that was common among the NL games was the 100BB buyin at the NL tables. That is, everywhere but Party. The shallow stacks at Party made for a very, very different game. Basically, in a hand with any action, you are very likely to be all in on the turn.
Where’s the skill in that?
How many times have you seen people just push pre-flop? On the flop? That’s right, a lot. Does that take skill? No. You just wait for a good hand, then push. Your decisions are done, you just have to wait for the rest of the cards to come.
As Homer Simpson would say, “BORING!”
Many people say NL is boring enough as it is. Fold for 3 orbits, then get one good hand and push hard. Then wait another 15 minutes before getting another hand. Throw in the very real possibility that you have a very good chance of being all in and it throws another twist in the situation. Sure, there’s some excitement to being all in, I mean, you may double up! Then again, at shallow buy ins, you’re very likely to get sucked out on.
That’s not to say there wasn’t money to be made there, mostly because not everybody pushed with good hands. Therefore, if you happened to have a good hand, you stood a good chance of making a big win.
The flip side is that you would often have to rebuy.
While not really a measurement of how good you are at a shallow buyin table, a rebuy can affect you. I’ve played as many hands at deep buyin (100BB) tables as at Party. I’ve only had to rebuy twice at the deep ones. There was hardly a night that went by on Party that I wouldn’t have to rebuy at least once. Of course, I also double up more on Party, but the net is still less.
More importantly, I make more at the deep buy ins.
Listen…I’m not the best player in the world. By most measures, I’m a break even or slight winner. I’m not crushing the game, but I don’t have to, I play for fun. That being said, I do think that poker is a game of skill. Shallow buyin NL is not so much a game of skill as it is a “hope I have a better hand when I push” game, especially at the old 25NL and 50NL tables.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that those of you who played there weren’t good and there definitely was money to be made there, but you’ve got to admit, it was a crapshoop sometimes.
So basically what I’m saying is that I, for one, welcome our new 100BB NL overlords at Party.
Good players (and like I said, I’m not even lumping myself into this), will benefit greatly from this change. Small pocket pairs and small suited connectors just went up in value. To make it even better, some people will move up just to stay with the same blinds. They will still push with nothing. I played at the 50NL on Wednesday and still saw a lot of all ins. My Hilton Sisters almost doubled me up when somebody went all in with Ace high on a ragged rainbow flop.
Of course, this will totally skew PokerTracker stats for existing Party players and their NL stats. I haven’t imported any new hands yet while waiting to see what Pat does. He alluded to making a patch that will adjust old hands or something.
As for how that affects the PL games…I can’t say and if it ruined it, that sucks. Personally, I don’t play PL and IMHO, this change has dramatically improved the NL game for decent players.
Poker Tracker Guide
More pimpage. Go get the guide here. I’m all for bloggers/readers getting this. There are still, oh, tens of thousands of people that play that will never use PokerTracker, so if you do, you may as well get the most out of it.
I hadn’t played a NL ring game for over a month at Party because of the shitty thin stacks. After playing at the Doyle’s Room $100 buy-in(25c-50c) for the past three months, I didn’t know how to play a stack with relatively little weight behind it, and my bankroll shows it now. This new blind structure can only be good for me!
My first thought when I saw that was the bad $25 NL players would move up to $50. I’ve only played once since the switch and saw nothing to dissuade me from this notion.
I totally agree about the changes in value of the middle drawing hands: the biggest adjustment I had to make when a Party bonus had to be cleared was to remember that implied odds were shot to hell.
Just thought you’d like to know, I caught the “slashdot” reference in your title.
Cuz’ all yer blogs’re belong to us’ns.
I’m glad somebody caught it
At least it wasn’t wasted.
I’m loving the new structure as well. Unfortunately I have no rakeback plan on any site so…. a bonus-whoring I go. Sigh.