Goodbye, Zarquon 9

   Now the good times are all gone,
   I'm bound for moving on...                 Neil Young

   I started playing poker online on the 8th of February 2011, on the Fulltilt poker site. I had checked out a few of the websites that compare different online poker rooms, and came up with a list of the five most promising names. At the time the plan was to try a different one of these sites every couple of months and then decide which one I liked the best at the end of the year. So I started with the middle-ranked site: Fulltilt. However, it soon became obvious that changing sites every couple of months would be a big hassle, especially as I was on dialup at the time, so I just stuck with my original choice.
   Just choosing a username proved to be a bit of a challenge. There was a huge number of players on Fulltilt so all the best names were long gone. Even apparently obscure, geeky names were unavailable, or were available only if a string of numbers was tacked on to the end, which I didn't really want to do. I had gone through quite a few possibilities before I finally settled on "Zarquon9". I thought that Zarquon would be a suitably obscure name, being the name of a minor character in the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy books, but it was already heavily used. However, my birthday is on the 9th, so when I saw that "Zarquon9" was available, I grabbed it.
 There was a huge number of games available on Fulltilt, including a lot of freerolls. There was a freeroll every night for New Zealand players, and a bunch of other free tourneys for all players on an almost hourly basis. My wife and I both had Fulltilt accounts and played a lot, sometimes even playing freerolls together, playing under her account and playing hands alternately. We particularly enjoyed "Rush Poker", a tourney where all players who fold a hand get instantly moved to a new table, creating non-stop action for everyone.

   Of course, in June it all fell apart when "Black Friday" happened (although it was a Saturday in New Zealand) and Fulltilt was shut down. What followed was a long and deafening silence from Fulltilt and I pretty much wrote off the money that was sitting in my Fulltilt account. As mentioned in previous posts, I went looking for the most stable, most reliable poker site I could find and ended up joining up with 888 Poker, where I've been playing ever since.
   When Fulltilt was resurrected last year, after being taken over by Pokerstars, I had no interest whatsoever in going back there. I toyed with the idea of trying to get my $US43 back, but in the end decided that it probably wasn't worth the effort. Then, earlier this month, I joined up with Pokerstars because I wanted to play Seven Card Stud and there were no games available on 888. Once I deposited some money with Pokerstars and took a look around the site, I discovered that it was possible to transfer cash between Fulltilt and Pokerstars accounts. So I decided to try to get my money back.
   Downloading the Fulltilt software was easy enough, although I had a little trouble getting back into my account because, even though I had my password written down, it was apparently wrong. But I was soon back into the Zarquon9 account and it proved to be pretty easy to transfer the money across to Pokerstars. Meanwhile, my wife decided to play with the $5 or so that was in her account and, as is usual, it was all soon gone. The Fulltilt Poker site looks much the same as before, although the table avatars seem to be a bit bigger than previously; a positive change. Zarquon9 still had a few thousand play-money chips, so I played a few hands for old times' sake, then signed out. I'd taken a look around the site to see if there was a way to close my account, but couldn't find anything. I've just finished uninstalling the software, so that's the end of my association with Fulltilt Poker.