I’ve been playing a lot of poker lately. Over the past months I’ve rediscovered my passion for the game and have been playing A LOT. I’ve taken the initial 1,000 chips given to players by the Pokerist app and turned it into over 1,000,000,000 in six months. That’s a billion with a big “B”, or a one million percent return on my initial investment. Sure it’s just play money, but I started at 2/4 games and have only played as big as 250/500k, so it’s not like I went big and got lucky – I earned every chip I made the hard way, by playing as if the chips were real and at levels that I was comfortable playing.
Not satisfied with playing just cash games, I started looking to get more tournament experience. When I started playing poker in 2003 I became a student of the game. I read every book I could get my hands on about the game and how to play it, the different strategies employed by players, and had gotten pretty good at the game. I was playing online tournaments and even winning them occasionally, with my best victory coming from defeating 54 other players. Now I was looking for tournament sites that weren’t the gambling sites, without much luck. I tried the WSOP app on Facebook, thinking it’d be the perfect solution, but alas, the app is not geared for tournaments. It only offers one-table sit-and-go tournaments, not the bigger ones I was looking for.
I had seen the ads during the World Poker Tour shows for ClubWPT and went looking for an app in Apple’s App Store, to no avail. They only have a web presence, built on java, and looking like it was designed by coders rather than designers. Booo WPT. As a public company, you should definitely invest in making apps and hire a good designer to rework your interface. I’m available, btw.
Despite it’s lackluster interface, ClubWPT does offer free, multi-table tournaments, so I started playing there. After a day or two of getting used to the interface and the intricacies of playing on my laptop, where the table background image barely fits, I started getting serious about the tourneys. I played my first satellite tournament. For those that don’t know, a satellite tournament is a lower cost way to win your way into a more expensive tournament. The top eight finishers in the satellite win a free entry into the Daily Double, and I made the cut from 42 players. Not a bad start, and I was looking forward to playing in the Daily Double for hopefully there would be a much bigger field. Sure enough, there were 152 people who had either won their way in or put up the 1,000 chip entry fee. This was more like it! I battled against the pack for almost two hours and ended up finishing eighth, taking home a nice 4,650 chip prize pool for my efforts.
Last night I made my daily sojourn to Starbucks to use their wifi, drink coffee, and play poker. I was hoping to get in some bigger tournaments again, and was happy to see another satellite was available. It was for entry into the big WPT Alpha8 tournament on Sunday. Surely there will be a ton of players vying for that prize pool! I entered the satellite and settled in to do battle again. After about an hour and a half, and making another final table, I realized that I was the chip leader and all I had to do was fold my hands and I’d win entry into the Alpha8, but I kept getting good cards. I wrestled briefly with playing it safe and just folding my way into the finals, but decided that I’d need the experience of continuing to play the final table when I was playing the big one. Plus, I was getting great cards, so I kept the pressure on my opponents. And, not only did I win my way into Sunday’s Alpha8, but I finished first, besting 41 other players on the way.
As of the time of this writing, Sunday is four days away, and I look forward to hopefully competing against a much bigger field. I think Sunday’s turn out for the tournament will be a good indicator of the overall popularity of ClubWPT, but given the number of players playing there and their painful interface, I shan’t be surprised to find myself back looking for bigger and better sites to play. Wish me luck! 🙂
