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June 16, 2004
VIP
When Party Poker recently canceled their bonus on account balance (a.k.a. interest payment) I was annoyed. They were giving you 10% annually on all balances up to $10k in your account, provided you played a few hands and didn’t cash out more than twice. This amounted to about $83 a month for me, since I just made sure to keep the full $10k in my account. So lacking any incentive to play at Party Poker rather than one of their skins I decided to look around and see if I could get a better deal elsewhere. I am still not ready to just give up on Party entirely, as their action is so much better than that of any other site, but I figured if one of the many Party Poker skins would give me something for playing there why not give it a try. So I promptly cashed out $8k of the $13k in my Party account and headed for greener pastures.
The only place I found with any decent sort of ongoing promotion appeared to be Empire Poker. This is the most well known Party skin, and they recently began offering a VIP club where you can earn VIP points. At first I thought it was a great idea, so I bought in for a few grand on there and started doing most of my play there. Then after a few days of playing about 1000 hands per day I noticed my VIP account was only going up 30 points. Upon closer examination it turns out the number of points you get for real money play is equal to the square root of the amount of hands you played, calculated daily. The square root? How did they come up with this?
Suppose you play 100 hands, you get 10 points. So if you play 200 you get 20 right? Nope, 14. Play 900 hands and you get a whopping 30. You played 9 times as many hands, but get 3 times the VIP points. So in effect they are saying that the more you play, the less they are going to give you per hand. How does this make any sense at all?
A book at that site costs 1500 VIP points. So at my current rate of 900 raked hands per day it would take me 50 days to earn this book, and that is playing 2 tables concurrently for 6 hours a day. So it is well over 600 table hours of play, and they are going to give me a book. On PokerStars you get 1 FPP for each hand played, and a book costs about the same amount, 1500 points. So there I would get a book every other day, rather than every 50.
I just can't think of any reason why someone intelligent enough to be in charge of promotions for an online cardroom worth millions of dollars would ever greenlight something so stupid. Hmm, let’s give people less as they play more. Yeah, that will draw them in. I think I am going to play 1 hand there per day, collect my 1 point, and then every 5 years get a free book from them. It would take 4 years to get it playing full time, so why not. And I’ll bet they wonder why every single tournament they guarantee has to have house money added to it.
Posted by themaroon at June 16, 2004 8:41 AM
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