White Belt Poker

My (hopefully) brief return to bonus-whoring went reasonably well last weekend at Bet 365. I easily played over a hundred raked hands in less than two hours (despite playing only one table while I got familiar with their software) to earn the first $20 of my $50 new player bonus. I ended up comfortably in the black even without taking the bonuses into consideration.

The players at the low limit hold’em tables were certainly a lot weaker on Friday and Saturday nights than they are on weeknights – which I suppose is likely to be the case everywhere these days. The flop percentages were noticably higher and the games I saw were much looser and more passive than I had seen previously. During the week, the tables were full of people who were clearly just playing by numbers to earn bonuses. At one point, while I was observing the play in order to pick a decent table, I actually saw eight hands in a row won by a pre-flop raise on a $1-$2 table. When you think about it, this doesn’t get anybody anywhere. The rake has to reach 25c to qualify as a raked hand and a pref-flop raise plus the blinds isn’t going to get near that.

Bet 365 certainly doesn’t look to me like a great place to play low limit hold’em on weeknights. The players are predominantly European, but even with an injection of north American players later in the evening (say after midnight GMT – 7pm ET), there still isn’t a great deal of choice on offer. Often the flop percentages are in the low-to-mid twenties, which can make the games pretty tedious unless you play maniacally. Unfortunately, that’s often when you start to see ‘implicit collusion’ slapping you around.

The bonus structure that they offer has a lot to do with this as well I believe. A $100 bonus each month per player for playing five hundred raked hands just encourages tight bonus-whoring players to sit there and rack up the hands while just aiming to break even. (Not that I’m in any position to criticise people for doing that). It’s no coincidence that you’ll frequently see articles on bonus-whoring mention Bet365 in the first paragraph as a good starting point to get a regular income going.

The other problem is that you’re allowed to wait at all tables at a particular limit until a certain specified number of players are seated. The end result is that you can often see the same five or six players all listed as ‘waiting’ on three different tables, but only one person has taken a seat, so nobody else is prepared to be the second or third player in. It’s a common problem at most sites (except perhaps Ultimate Bet where they give bonus points for being the first one in), but this ability to specify a minimum number of players before you enter really exacerbates the problem.

I think I’ll need to take a closer look at the NL tables. I’ve found that it’s usually possible to find a profitable NL game, even at sites where I’ve struggled to find a soft game because of the lack of European players (Full Tilt for example). Otherwise Bet365 will just be a part-time weekend thing for me.