Rejoining the Party
I bought back into Party Poker last night, for the first time since November 2003. I've written about my dislike of Party Poker before. Basically I was profitable there for a while last year, then had a couple really bad sessions and decided I didn't want to deal with the manics and the variance anymore.

In the past few weeks I've moved up to $2/$4. The Paradise games are pretty tight and I haven't shown a profit in the couple sessions I've tried there. I'm beating the Absolute $2/$4 game, but there is only a decent game there about half the time time I check. Plus no one was at the $1/$2 Paradise 7-Stud game. So I figured maybe it was time to give Party another try. Of course fellow poker bloggers' countless recommendations for Party influenced me, most recently Degenerate's comment that "If you can play poker, Party's 2/4 is easily beatable if you have the proper bankroll," which sounds as much like a challenge as a recommendation :) Most importantly, I think I'm a better player than I was 8 months ago, in terms of both card play and tilt control.

The Party experience has changed since I was last there. The software's better, notably 1) the new-fangled lobby, 2) no hiccups (I remember the annoying "shaking screen" from months ago), 3) not really a software improvement, but I turned off the characters and it makes the graphics a lot more bearable. But the biggest change was the players. Less than 6 people were seeing some flops (!) Some hands were being won without a showdown (!!) Where were the maniacs capping preflop with 2 suited cards? This is not the Party I remember.

I'm assuming I saw more rational play because I was at $2/$4 and not .50/$1. Or maybe I just got lucky. Either way, I'll look for these somewhat-rational-but-still-very-beatable (basically loose-weak, but not crazy loose) tables in the future (and I still plan to avoid the .50/$1 "poker slots" entirely).

I picked up $78 on the evening, in the course of hopping around to 4 different tables. Here's hoping that the Party stays this much fun . . .

As always, I don't want to be results-oriented, but I just hafta share some numbers that are at an all-time high for me: My current online bankroll is now over $850. Total poker winnings: $1,252.88. Poker earnings: $458.78 ($616 since I started using PokerTracker). Happy happy.
posted by James at 10:54 AM