Grinding it out, one day at a time

So what are my initial thoughts and impressions of this move? Well I didn’t play last night as I went to Mrs Pudding’s for beers and Chinese takeaway (I’m at the pinnacle of physical fitness obv.) but I did download the new software and set up a new account as requested by their customer support. I encountered a couple of problems but their customer support rang ME and it was soon sorted out. I can’t tell you how pleasing and reassuring it is to be able to email, have live chat and be able to phone someone who actually speaks English as their first language! I rarely need to use support / customer services but when I do it often involves asking a few questions and a lot of the foreign agents struggle to understand the Yorkshire accent, even though mine isn’t really broad, and I’m never confident that they know what they’re doing!

One worry I had was the actual look of Bet365’s software. Normally I don’t really care as I’m not staring at it for 6-8 hours a day but go have a look at it if you get chance, it is awful. GG retinas! Thankfully Bowmans must have realised this and have changed the horrific green to a more suitable dark blue and it actually looks ok. I’m not too impressed with the lobby but how long do we actually spend in their anyway? The cards look decent and the game speed seems quick enough and from what I hear there is a nice stream of fish on the Prima network. As far as I’m aware it is Poker Tracker and Poker Ace HUD compatible and the PAHUD is meant to work with the mini-view which would be awesome as I could play 5-8 tables using this and really start flying through the stakes.

One thing that got on my nerves a little was the fact I was half way through clearing a $100 bonus on Bowmans and this has been declared void as their rewards scheme, loyalty bonus, whatever you want to call it are totally different. I’d started planning to use that $100 towards my starting bankroll for 2007 so I may have to now start with closer to $400 than $500. As I have lost this bonus Bet365 gave me a whopping $10 free to play with and also a $500 bonus to clear. This bonus clears at a rate of $5 per 100 “Loyalty Points” but I can’t seem to find out how these points are earned so I can’t work out at present how many raked hands I think this bonus will take. At my stakes it’s bound to clear slowly but it’d be nice to be able to clear $30-$50 before the New Year as this means I won’t have to add as much to my online roll from my bank!

One thing I’ve noticed is they don’t do NL25 and have NL20 instead, guess their software doesn’t like splitting the SB/BB when the BB is an odd number? Anyway, this means I have around 13.5 buyins online at present so am still within my comfort zone. Just wish I hadn’t had to cash out the $380 for bills etc otherwise I’d probably give NL50 a shot and see how that went, but such is life. I’m working my bar shift tonight but should hopefully be able to get online for a couple of hours after I finish and test out the Prima players. I’ll be playing 6-max NL20 but I may use their free $10 to play in some of the 15 and 20 seat short-handed SnG’s that Beatme has been having some decent success in as of late.

I’ll post my crazy Tribeca graph and stats when I get in from work and should have an update on my initial thoughts on Prima tomorrow.

Thanks for checking in, now get back to those damn tables!