White Belt Poker

PartyGaming shares eventually went down by about a third yesterday, and took other companies down with them. There seem to be serious concerns about whether the online poker market is really going to continue to grow:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1564139,00.html

“Mr [Richard] Segal [PartyGaming CEO] also admitted that much of PartyGaming’s huge advertising splurge has been a waste of money. He said the group would now adopt “a rifle, not a shotgun” approach to marketing.

It wants to concentrate on retaining customers, studying their behaviour “to maximise lifetime player values”.

Yesterday’s numbers showed a drop in the yield per player per day of 7% to $17.80 (£9.65). Mr Segal said the site had suffered from offers of cash bonuses to poker players from rival operators.”

Apparently, it’s also somehow Joe Hachem’s fault for having the audacity to win the WSOP main event this year, despite not being an American male online qualifier.

The value of PartyGaming shares has gone down by 25% this morning because of concerns that profits can’t continue to grow as quickly as they have recently, and also because of the ever-present spectre of US government legal action.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1563656,00.html

I just remembered yesterday that the EPT returns on September 13th in Barcelona.

PokerStars appear to have exclusive rights to offer satellite qualifying tournaments, although I’m not certain about that. I can’t recall getting any emails from any of the other places that I play about EPT events anyway.

I’ve decided to take a crack at qualifying for the London event at the end of September and perhaps for some of the other events after that. I’ve been looking for a target after several months of just kind of drifting along, so now I’ve found one.

PokerStars is one of the places where I don’t already have an account. I like the look of their software though and the hand histories can be automatically loaded into Poker Tracker too.