Party Party

   Well, here in New Zealand we had 102 days with no community transmission of covid 19 and then we hit a speed bump. Somehow it got back in and the city of Auckland went back up to Level 3; only essential retail outlets open, limits on gatherings, social distancing etc. So my brief window of live poker came to an end again and I had to go back to the online games. As it happens, this worked out quite well for me.

 Back in July, when we were still at Covid Level 1, I'd been surfing around on some poker websites when I came across something interesting. It was an article that claimed that the easiest Sit and Go tournaments around were to be found on Party Poker. According to this article Party Poker has been trying to make itself more attractive to recreational players. One way they were doing this was by running ring games where the participants were 'anonymised'. Players'  user names don't get listed, which makes it impossible for other players to use tracking software to gather information on their opponents. In other words, Party Poker was trying to discourage the grinders. This sounded like great news to me, so I went to Party Poker and signed up.

   However, when I went looking for these juicy ring games, there were none available, at least not at the micro level. They were listed, but no-one was playing. The only games available were 6 max tables, so I gave them a shot. I figured that to adjust to a short handed game I needed to play more hands more aggressively. I tried that for a couple of sessions, but with a singular lack of success. After that I had a look around the site and realised that all the game types were structured in such a way as to encourage lots of action. So I decided to try out a few of these games, just for fun. And once the covid restrictions kicked in I had plenty of time to check out what Party Poker had to offer.

   The Sit and Go games are all turbos or hyper-turbos. I tried my hand at the turbos, where the blind levels go up every 5 minutes and the whole game usually lasts no more than about 30 minutes. I played these using a basic strategy that can be boiled down to 'play tight and aggressive, let the other guys fight it out then get loose aggressive approaching the money'. Oh yeah and 'pick on the short stacks'. This worked out pretty well for me. There was a lot of action, with many players, myself included, looking for spots to get all their chips in the middle. You can't be messing around with drawing hands in this kind of game. So after years of avoiding turbo games I came away from these sessions with a tidy little profit.

   My next project was the Spin and Go games. These are hyper-turbo 3 player tournaments that typically last about 10-15 minutes. The prize-pool is variable and can be higher than the amount paid in or (more usually) lower. I'd played these before on Pokerstars but hadn't done well. I had better results on Party Poker. I think this is because there are quite a few players who just aren't adjusting to the breakneck pace of this game type. They are often folding way too much and raising way too seldom. As for me, I'm playing nearly every hand and betting a lot, whether I hit or not. Although I did quite well, it could have been better. Unfortunately, because the prize varies, there's not much you can do about it if you lose when the prize is higher and win when it's lower.

   Not content with these two game types, I decided to try my hand at the 'Fast Forward' game. This is a ring game where there is a large pool of players with each player being moved to a new table when they fold. Most sites have this type of game, under various different names. On 888 Poker they are called 'Snap" games. I only played this a couple of times and came out marginally ahead. The one drawback was that they were 6 player tables and if the player pool was small (which it often was) then you might end up playing 4 handed sometimes. I wasn't too keen on that.

   It's interesting working out an effective strategy for Fast Forward games. Initially I was thinking that I should just play premium hands as everyone else was likely to be folding a lot until they hit something decent. So it made sense to be only playing hands that were likely to be ahead. But after a while I realised that if everyone else was making a similar assumption then there was an opportunity for some serious bluffing in position. If most of the players just fold unless they have something really good, then a few good late position bets can often induce other players to give up without a fight. So that's the way I played it; much like the other action games.

   As if all that wasn't enough I also played in a few 'regular' tournaments. Except that nothing on this site is regular. All of the multi-table tournaments I could find (at the micro stakes at least) were progressive bounty tournaments. This was a new one on me and I had to Google it to find out what it meant. So it turns out to be a tournament where half the buy-in  goes to a player's bounty and only half of a won bounty goes to the winning player: the rest is added to the bounty on the winner's head. So as the game progresses the bounties on the remaining players get bigger and bigger. I guess it becomes more and more about busting out players rather than going deep, but I wouldn't know because in the few games I played I never went deep. Yet another action game.

   I never came near cashing in the handful of progressive bounty tourneys that I played, but that's okay. You have to play a decent number of tournaments before you can get an idea of how you're doing, and I'm just not that keen on making that sort of commitment. I'm perfectly happy to keep playing in the other short-run game types for now. My best results came from the Turbo Sit and Gos so that's what I'll be concentrating on for now, with maybe the odd Spin and Go or Fast Forward thrown in for good measure.

   It's ironic really that I came to Party Poker because I was looking for a good ring game and ended up being seduced by the action games that I've always shunned in the past ('You don't know the power of the dark side'). But, even though it's early days yet, the results so far speak for themselves. The long 'tail' of our Covid 19 outbreak looks like it's finally coming to an end, so the live games can't be too far away now. But for now I'm actually enjoying playing online poker. We may be living in difficult times but for me, it's party time.