Updates Galore

I've been slacking off in the blogging department for the last two months, but that doesn't mean I haven't been playing poker online. In fact, I'm playing fairly regularly, now, and am probably playing more hands per month than I have in the past. For the month of February, I played about 6200 hands, and for March I played about 7700 hands.

At the beginning of February, I decided to try to find a poker site to call home. Ever since Neteller pulled out of the US market, reload bonuses have totally dried up, and after finishing all the promos at PSO and several at other affiliates, I'm left with promos at a few European sites which don't really interest me at all, due to the low traffic during the times I play. Consequently, I decided to pick a good site where I could do the majority of my play, instead of constantly jumping from room to room.

My first choice was Full Tilt Poker, but unfortunately, I don't have rakeback there because I (unwisely) chose to do the PSO points promo for it several months back. So I decided to give Cake Poker, where I have 33% rakeback, another try, especially after hearing that the traffic there has increased considerably lately. Indeed, traffic there is much improved, now. Whereas before I had difficulty finding even a single full table of $100 NL, it is now possible to find about four of them going on during the late evenings when I play (this works out well for me, because my comfort level is playing four tables at a time). The increase in traffic is due mainly to the influx of players from Sportsbook.com, which recently joined the Cake network as a skin. If you recall, Sportsbook.com used to own Paradise Poker before they left the US market, but now they've opened up a new US-friendly poker room and have enticed all the orphaned US players from Paradise to sign up. So, if you have ever wondered what happened to all the fish that used to populate Paradise Poker, you can now find them on the Cake Poker network.

After December and January's downswing, I was playing with a reduced bankroll, so I restricted my play to $50 NL for all of February. With the play at Cake Poker being quite soft, I was able to double my bankroll to $2000+ by the end of February. So for March, I moved back up to my regular level at $100 NL and continued to play at Cake, but also played at Full Tilt to clear a $100 bonus that they offered me during that month. Again, I did pretty well for the month, and ended up doubling my bankroll again to $4000+ by the end of March. Now that I'm properly bankrolled for $200 NL with 20+ buy-ins, my plan is to move up another level for the month of April to $200 NL, and see how it goes. If I continue to do well and can build my bankroll up to at least 15 buy-ins at the next level, I will aggressively continue to move up levels, with a goal of hopefully reaching $600 NL ($3/$6), where I plan to stay for a while to work on my game, before attempting $1000 NL ($5/$10), which, from what I hear, is a much bigger jump in terms of toughness of the competition.

SNG Challenge Update

I played some more $5+$1 SNG's on Titan in February, and placed 5, 3, 1, 7, 7, 3, 7. After this point, I abandoned my challenge, because the progress was just too slow for me. I felt my time was better spent working on my cash game, and occasionally working on my MTT tournament game. So, I ended up with a bankroll of $53 after playing 30 SNG's, paying $174 in entry fees, for a 30% ROI and 43% ITM. I guess that's not too shabby for starting off with a free $2+$0.20 ticket.


Bankroll Update

I made $53 from the SNG challenge, $94 from the PSO Small Game 2, $1625 from Cake Poker for the months of February and March, $1,104 from Full Tilt while clearing their bonus, and $112 from Paradise while clearing some bonus money in February. I lost $98 playing $100 NL at Mansion Poker, and another $100 after playing in one of their $100K guaranteed tourneys and not finishing in the money (finished about middle of the pack). This brings my bankroll to $4,017.


Neteller Update

Well, as everyone knows by now, Neteller will be blocking online gambling transactions by Canadians after April 9th. To deal with this, I am in the process of getting an ePassporte account running. I chose this option over the others, because ePassporte is the only ewallet that currently works with all the major North American poker sites. I will use this to move money between the various poker sites where I plan to play (Cake, FTP, Stars, Absolute, and UB). The disadvantage of ePassporte is the limit they place on the value of single transactions (limited to $500 per transaction). This means that you need to move money around in chunks of $500, which can be cumbersome if you have a large bankroll. You also need to load your account with some money via a credit card, before you can use it. There is also speculation that ePassporte may leave the North American online gambling market in the near future, but I guess I will just have to deal with that if/when that occurs.

Meanwhile, I have also opened a US dollar bank account at TD Canada Trust, which I plan to use for cashouts either via mailed cheques or echecks. Some sites, such as Stars, can also be linked to your bank account for both deposits and withdrawals. I have also applied for a US dollar VISA card (also through TD Canada Trust), which I will use as a secondary method of depositing money into sites. When I plan to deposit, I will put the VISA card in a credit balance to avoid the transactions from being processed as cash advances.

My bankroll will basically be divided amongst the few sites that I plan to play at. The majority of it will be at Cake for rakeback play, a little at Full Tilt for bonuses, a little at Stars for tourneys, a couple hundred at Absolute for the PSO league, and a couple hundred at Mansion for their $100K guaranteed tourneys.

Earnings-to-date: $14,614