I've got cabin fever...

Cabin fever

I've been really out of it for the last few days. I had a procedure at the hospital today, and since I basically had an unavoidable sick day, I was able to take a second shot at Party's Cabin fever promo and this time I won! (I busted in the 40s on Sunday on the hand immediately after my wife asked "When are we having dinner?" :P That A9o suddenly looked like an absolute monster, and I decided the chip leader was just being a bully....)

I was barely able to stay awake to play for the first few hours today. I hadn't eaten anything in over 36 hours, was not able to keep any food down, and was still recovering from anesthesia. I had to prop myself up on a couple of pillows and sleep between hands. (Again, my wife was not impressed with how well I've been taking care of myself, particularly as she has no interest in the game... Scurvy is the man.)

Now that I have a free cruise, I need to figure out if I can go. (The cart ALWAYS goes before the horse in my world). I'm in the VIP thing, so I guess the worst case is that I get the $500 VIP bonus. I guess it is really just a question of motivation. If I had won a PPM V package instead of just the cruise package, I'd have booked my plane ticket already. My wife almost certainly can't get the time off, so perhaps I could take one of my parents.

The fields in these Cabin Fever freerolls are reasonably soft. Less all-in donkeys than a typical Party MTT (though they are still around), but that is substantially compensated for by the overly tight grinders (who would have played 1000 rh and signed up for a freeroll, but don't seem to have much MTT, NL, and/or SNG experience) who you can steal from in the middle of the MTT (that you can identify from having data mined 10 tables from the start) A good 10-15% of the registered field doesn't show up for the event.
I'd recommend anyone that can meet these criteria to take a shot:
1) capable of putting in the 1000 raked hands in a day (multitabling small stakes NL games is a safe low variance way to get the hands in cheaply)
2) available to play in the freeroll on the following day at 7pm EST. Even starting at 8-8:30pm is quite reasonable because you won't be blinded down much. Party is using the 20 min levels for this event.
3) you have any reasonable likelihood of being able to make it to the cruise
4) even better if you are a Party VIP, because you will also get $500 cash
Party caps the entries at 300 per freeroll. Sunday's had something close to 190, and today's had less than 250. Even at 300, 5% of the entrants are getting a cabin. There are not many "cheap" supers that pay out such a large % of the field. For a non-VIP, a freeroll entry has a minimum overlay value of $125 ($2500x15/300), and for a VIP the min overlay is $150.

The freerolls are running daily up until this Saturday.

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Shoutout

Thanks to rikkidee for the tip on how to adjust the formatting of the text in this blog. Canadians are such nice folk....

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Deep Stack, Deep time investment

Still haven't put much effort into preparing for the Shooting Stars. The Stars Deep Stack events sound like a good idea. But boy do they take a long time to run. I can really appreciate Jodi's list of other accomplishments.

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Party VIP Acceler-8-tor

Someone complained that I often discuss topics without providing any background info to the uninformed. So for those who don't already know: The Party VIP club is a program designed to reward high volume players with a variety of incentives for their play. It is labelled an "invitation-only" system. However, the only requirement for qualifying is to have an MGR (monthly gross revenue) in excess of $1k, and players can just email the vip department asking to be added if they have not already been "invited" and would qualify.

The latest program from the VIP department is a promotion that is actually starting to make some good sense for both sides, Party and the high volume pro or semi-pro (high volume donkeys, as described in Scurvy's post, are still not being properly taken care of). It is of reasonable length duration which really does benefit Party since they end up with a fairly decent idea of the play volume to expect over a moderate period of time (a pretty good idea for any publicly trading multi-billion dollar company)

Anyways, I am happy with the playing targets they issued me because it works out to somewhere close to $2k per month in bonuses with me spending only 50% of my nominal monthly playing time in Party ring games. I'm not being sarcastic with the word only. I had been worried it would be over 100%.

I have often complained about Party, but with my mouse-RSI problems, Party is really the only site that I can comfortably put in the hours. I still have the freedom to allocate the other 50% of my poker time in a wide variety of ways.

As a nice little bonus, Party gave me a $55 compensation because I emailed them after receiving the pop-up on Friday well prior to the start of the promotion. It is one of those rare occasions when Party delivers more than they promise. (of course, this occurs after they retardedly put up information before they should; another example: trialing their new Party Points store in the middle of the night on a live site... Yup, the laughable actions of a publicly traded billion dollar company)