Silver Case

After what Father Malachi Martin would refer to as my poker ‘Chastisement’ in Las Vegas, I bought a couple books on low-limit-no-limit texas holdem (the game we commonly play) and looked for some online venues. I found software called Poker Academy Professional. It looked better than most of the other software I’d seen, and it had an OSX version, so I bought it. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it.

The offline play (me versus robots) isn’t that compelling. I seemed to soon be beating the “better” bots handily. Whether that’s because they are bad or I am a bad (thus confusing) player isn’t clear. Probably both. There are supposed to be analysis features that look at how you play, or train scenarios or something, but I haven’t used them. What has please me most so far is the online play.

Playing versus other people is more fun, and more realistic. The problem with playing things like Yahoo Poker is that they are free, thus people play carelessly and frivolously. So it provides no realistic simulation of how people play when money is at stake. Thus, it’s useless.

How does Poker Academy Online manage to make free play more like money play? By putting you in Poker Purgatory first. There are lots of game tables, but until you’ve won or placed in the free tournaments and accumulated enough virtual money (called ‘Pax’), you aren’t allowed to play any ring games or serious tournaments or arrange your own games with friends. And if you blow all your dough at the Pax tables, back you go to Purgatory, which they call the ‘free roll’ tables.

These tables are not nearly as bad as, say, Yahoo Poker, but they can be extraordinarily tedious. What you find almost every tournament is the first hand (there will generally be between three and five tables of ten players each) one monkey goes ‘all in’ and three or four people follow suit. It’s a little mini-lottery for them. I loathe it. The worst is when my first hand is a reasonably strong one like today (JJ). Stupid not to join the mayhem, but then when I bust out, I have to go back and wait for the next tournament. I almost pray for a 27o for my first hand at these tournaments.

Anyway, right now that is not a concern, because I got away with about $50 PAX and then went to a cash table where I doubled that, fairly monotonically, in about an hour. Then I went away wanting more. These games are much more civil/proper, although there was one retard who ran through 600$ worth of senseless ‘bluffing’ before he was bankrupted away. I didn’t have any super stunning play myself, although I did nicely milk one guy for as much as he had, slow-playing an AA. And, as I tend to do, got broadsided by a drawn flush at some point. Moi-Doo-Doo

Trackback URI | Comments RSS