Bonus, rakeback, and whining for action

I passed another milestone last night. At CDPoker, for each hand you're dealt, if the rake is 25¢ or more (meaning the pot is $5+), you get a point for each 25¢ of rake. Get 500 points, and you get $10 of your signup or deposit bonus paid out. As further motivation, your bonuses expire after three months.

I hit 500 points last night. +$10. The points have been coming a lot faster now that I've been playing 50¢/$1 tables.

Only about 2000 more points to go to collect my remaining $41 in bonus money. It's unlikely that I'll hit that by the end of June, unless I jump up to the $1/$2 tables, and I don't plan on doing that until my bankroll is at around $200.

FWIW, I also signed up through a rakeback site (tell 'em TravisL sent you), which will pay out 30% of the rakes I contribute. For example, for a hand at a 10 person table resulting in a $10 pot resulting in 50¢ of rake, I'd have contributed 5¢, meaning I'd get a 1.6¢ rakeback. The rakeback gets paid out once it hits $25 (minus a 15% fee), but if I wait until $100, the fee is waived. Micro money, but it's still a positive flow. I'm at about $5.

At the tables themselves, yesterday was an up-and-down kind of day. I played before noon yesterday, and after being down $15, ended up down only $5. After the Easter festivities ceased, I played more last night, and came across the fishiest 50¢/$1 table I've seen in a long time. Very generally speaking, you can tell how good a player is by how many chips they have in front of them. If someone buys in for $20, I figure them for an average player, like me. A lot of times, a newbie or weak player will buy in for the minimum, $5, which isn't enough to ram-and-jam the pot if they flop quads to their pocket aces. Most of the time, the 50¢/$1 tables have two or three people below $20, and the other seven above, some up at $60 or $80. If the table's all above $20, I tend to look for easier pickings -- no sense in being the small fish in the pond.

So last night, I check the tables, and at a full table of ten players, the biggest stack was $12. C'mon get in the boat, fish. C'mon get in the boat fish fish.

So even given my -$5 for the morning, I ended up +$17, plus the $10 bonus.

I also discovered a great psychological strategy. I got dealt KK in the big blind, so raised pre-flop. The next few players folded, so I whined, "gimme some action". The button did; I'm sure he thought I was bluffing. I rammed-and-jammed, and he called me from the raggy flop through the rainbow river with middle pair. Bwah ha hah.

I did the same thing with pocket aces at another table 20 minutes later, with the same result. Reelin' 'em in. Tasty.