So…obviously I lied.  I said I would be back tomorrow.  I just couldn’t get here.  Read the 1st part to make sense of this part…or maybe not, maybe it only makes sense to me since I’m the one writing it.

Along with the rake, the tipping, the pot limit law, the Bad Beat Jackpot usually had $1 taken from each pot of $X amount of dollars, if the pot didn’t reach enough to have a $1 taken from it, even if you got a bad beat, you couldn’t win it unless the pot was a certain amount, there had to also be a certain number of players in the pot, and the two card hands to claim the bad beat got more strict as time went on.

One time a Bad Beat jackpot went off at the Palace Hotel poker room, one of the owners of the game won the big share (got the biggest hand beat) and the jackpot was around $34,000.  WOW!  Five hundred players, give or take a few, shelled out all the money to build the jackpot (and were getting raked off the table at the same time) and in that economy, $34,000 was a mind boggling enormity that one couldn’t even fathom.  And one of the owners pocketing over $15,000 was a real mind blower too. That money was never coming back into the poker community.  Another time late night, a Bad Beat jackpot went off at the Palace Hotel with only the required amount of players in the game, the dealer, the floor man was probably in the game, and it happened after the table took a break so a few of them could use the bathroom.  At a later time I heard the deck was set up while the players walked around – they all knew about it and it was agreed on before who would get what cut – and the Palace poker room got paid back for what one of the players that won it owed the room on the books.  SWEET!

Those Montana games went from bad to worse.  The joke used to run that it was the same players fighting over the same $20 for the last 100 years and that’s about the size of it.  Flawed marketing. Put shills or stake players in the game to keep them running, keep pulling a jackpot rake or giving a bonus to bring people in, but keep taking all the money out of action so no one can afford to play.

Fast forward to internet poker.  It has its own bundle of flaws.  Everyone is trying to bring in a player base to make their site pay its way and pull in a profit.  It’s hard to do when facing all the competition out there – and yes, competition makes for a healthy market place – and there are so many bonuses and give-aways that the game of poker can never be played like it was meant to be played; where players buy-in, perhaps elect to rebuy, and there are waiting lists.  Even with a market as big as the world, the money in the playing field begins to thin out, and with all of the tournaments, jackpots, and bonuses, it’s a form of busting the players.

Charging the players a fee to deposit and withdraw is just wrong. Who cares if the poker site has to pay for transactions?  Really?  I don’t!  I don’t want to pay a fee when I put money in my account.

Giving bonuses of VPPs and FPPs and whatever form of player points each site gives is a good thing IMHO.  Players should be rewarded for spending hours on a site. And why do we have to buy some crummy thing that advertises the site like a hat or a shirt? We should be paid to wear them!  Give us cash, damn it!

The number of tournaments that are running around the clock is hard on poker.  I’m sure to get an argument with that but before you figure that I’m completely off in left field with that, take a look at how many people in an MTT barely cruise into the money, perhaps getting their buy-in back with the way the pay-out structure is, and how many never make the money, and how many consistently cash top 20…yeah, right! I know because I’ve played a million MTTs and I may not be the best but I’m not the worst, you have to have a lot of luck to slide through the pack.

Years ago there were only a few major poker tournaments, the live games ran very strong all the time, especially during tournament time, but even without a tournament, you could count on a certain number of games in a known casino.  It’s painfully obvious now when the big tournaments hit Vegas, like the WSOP, the WPT, the Venetian DeepStack, the Wynn Classic Summer Guarantee, The WSOP Circuit Event, Festa al Lago, The Doyle Brunson North American Poker Classic, and the list goes on; the whole town lights up and poker action is running everywhere but as soon as the tournament is gone, the town gets quiet. Most of them run competition with each other, and they have to to stay in business, but it spreads the player base pretty thin.

Online poker tournaments pull players to them for the chance to win a big pay out, and I admit I’m one of them.  I like playing online poker tournaments for a lot of reasons but unless you hit something at the final table, you spend a disgusting amount of hours spinning your wheels for pennies an hour – that is especially true in lower limit buy-ins.  Most of the online poker playing world is comprised of lower limit buy-in players.  However, online poker tournaments are here to stay.  There is no way to step back from them now and give all the fuel to live action games because the poker playing population wants them.  Include me in that.  But I still believe they are very hard on poker in general.  When someone pulls in a big win, that money is going somewhere else, even a grinder is going to take a chunk of it and do something personal.

I realize I’m painting myself into a corner with this diatribe, but I can’t help myself.  I want to spew.
The bad beat jackpots run in online poker are one of the worst deals of all time for taking money out of the playing field.  Sure, I’ve played in them myself when the jackpots got big on Absolute Poker.  I even won around $300 when a big one got hit and I was playing the same stakes/game that it hit in.  That doesn’t mean I like them.

Here’s the main reason I don’t like them, aside from the fact that millions of dollars have been taken out of the playing field in the jackpot drop – never to be seen again since it’s usually won in a micro limit game and those players are never going to keep playing higher and higher, the house always gets a ‘handling fee’ which is just like tacking on more rake.

The perfect example: UB poker player ODESSA99 won the biggest bad beat jackpot at the Cereus Network on February 28th and it was an amazing $1,048,383.80. ODESSA99’s share was $340,875.15.  Good luck on collecting that now with Cereus not even considering a payment plan to pay back players’ accounts and possibly they never will…now that’s a true bad beat.  “Hey, I won the jackpot!” A few months later, “I can’t collect it, they’re gone busto!”

Here’s how the Cereus Network payout went: 50% goes to the Bad Beat victim, 25% goes to the winner of the hand, and $1000 goes to every other player at the Bad Beat table. Out of the remaining balance, 25% rolls over to the next Bad Beat Jackpot, 10% goes to Absolute Poker /Ub and the rest is divided up among every player who is playing the same game type and stakes when the Bad Beat Jackpot is cracked.

Since the launch of the Bad Beat Jackpot at Absolute Poker and UB, thousands of players have shared in a staggering total of $61,774,438.56 in jackpot cash. Keep in mind that 10% went to the house for a handling fee so they collected over $6Million on jackpots alone.

And when ODESSA99 won, the new jackpot was already seeded with $299,732.95. Every time a jackpot hits X, a new one starts, it keeps players from going to another site.  There’s never any interest paid out to players on those jackpots when they’re hit is there?  So…once the software is set up, it may need an update, technicians, etc. but 10%?  WOW! Casino poker rooms do the same thing, take a % for a ‘handling fee’ which makes me insane.

I’m not a big fan of a stable of pros at an online poker site either.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand the theory behind skilled endorsements and Gillette foamy and super socks and great golf clubs and the whole ball of wax, but how many does it take to represent a site?  It’s almost like a parade to see whose pro list is bigger than the next guy.

I happen to live in the US which means I can’t jump into just any online poker site – that really sucks.  I’m extremely disappointed with Full Tilt Poker and the way the whole process of making sure players got their funds back that just hasn’t happened.  I really never had high hopes for Absolute/UB, so, no disappointment there.  PokerStars performed as I thought they would. But if I had a choice of online sites to play at, I would pick Party Poker – it’s all about just playing the game.

I think poker sites should have promotions and bonuses, but I also believe it should be in baby steps where it doesn’t bust the players. And it should be geared to the average Joe and Jill that play and pay the most to be there. I hate it when a high limit player or pro begins acting like they are special and the poker world should bow down to recognize them with special events that are only for those recognized in poker.  Seriously, who do you think makes up the bread and butter of a poker site’s income?  The high limit player?  Go figure.  Just like in casino poker rooms, the lower limits pay the highest rake and get fewer comps and benefits.  Even FPPs and VPPs increase by limit played.  Gee…

As a dealer I can remember hearing over the years, “Well, X is playing high limit, it’s hard to take those losses!” when they got out of line at the table.  Why is it harder for them to take a loss than it is for someone that lives on limited income like Social Security? It’s all relative.  It isn’t any fun to lose no matter what limit you play. I could be wrong but I think the majority of the income at a poker site comes from the small to mid-limit games and not the high limit games.

It also isn’t any fun to be raped by the rake or the jackpot drop or know that tournaments are taking a toll on live action.  I don’t have the answers.  Many players love jackpots and they aren’t going to just go away either.

I’d like to just be able to log onto a poker site, not look at the pros, just find a few great games without all the hoopla and possibly a promotion or two that was easy to swallow and know that online poker was going to go on and on and on and on, so I could play any time I wanted, until I’m 200 or so years old – in low limit.

End of diatribe…for now anyway.