Just When It Starts To Get Good

I'm sorely disappointed in Absolute Poker right now. I had been singing their praises when it came to tournaments there and they go and mess things up. Upon starting up Absolute's software last night an update began to download. This is usually a good thing but their software people, not unlike those of the company I work for, usually mess up something that was working when trying to fix something that isn't. The largest glaring problem arising from the new update though was not software managements problem but operational managements problem. The $5 + .50 Single Table Tournaments are now gone, replaced by the player raping $6 + $1 tables. The juice has gone from an acceptable 10% to 16.66%. Oddly the $2 tables remained at a 10% juice and the $10 tables did as well. Normally I would just move to the $10 tables but my bankroll can't support that right now. The $2 tables although very beatable simply don't pay enough to make it worthwhile. The $5 tables were clearly the most popular on the site and Absolute has deemed it necessary to take it's patrons to the cleaners. If profits were the problem I would much rather give up the very frequent reload bonuses as opposed to paying more juice. Now I have to find a new site to play my SnG's. I'll probably move to one of the prima sites as their tables used to be pretty soft. I haven't played at any of them for a while but I'll check it out tonight.

With all the bitching about the single table tourneys the multi's are still juicy. I played in a freeroll (well player points buy-in) last night and discovered a problem I have. The first hour of the tournament I managed to build my stack nicely and stayed well above the average stack. At the first break a $10 tournament was starting up that I had bought into and I quickly discovered that although I can multi table SnG's I shouldn't multi table multi table tournaments. So much of my betting rely's on my read of the other players in these tournaments that I couldn't keep enough focus going on both. I'm sure I could learn this skill but for now I'm not going to try. I made it to the next break on both tournaments but was starting to be pretty short stacked at both. I decided to just tighten up and play only premium hands on the $10 tourney and put my focus on the other since we were further along. I only lasted 20 minutes after the break and just couldn't get the card to make a comeback. I went out in 30th and the top 15 paid. I was very disappointed getting that close and not making it.

Shifting my focus to the remaining tournament I was just too short stacked there to make a difference as well. Only 89 entered this tournament so making the money should have been a walk in the park for me but I busted out 41st and learned a valuable lesson. I fired up two $2 SnG's to try to recoup my $10 loss. I finished 2nd, and 5th so made back a little but not all of my earlier buy-in. I'm still feeling good and as long as I learn from the losses I'll only get better.

As I'm going on the hunt for a new single table tourney site tonight so I welcome any suggestions.