After I finished up over at Yahoo poker, I was looking for a new site and some different games than 2/4 limit hold'em play money. But where to go? There are many poker sites.
To help decide I used what I'll call the stock car racing method. Years ago I was into NASCAR. Around the period 1989-1994 I knew all the top drivers and teams and watched quite a few races. I liked the Ford cars and Mark Martin. I haven't wathed a full race since around 1996. Nothing against NASCAR, it's a great product. I was just too busy with other stuff for it.
Anyway, I recall seeing this bumper sticker one time. It said something like "I do business with companies that sponsor stock car racing". Something like that. What that means is you reward the companies that sponsor NASCAR by buying their products. So in the early 90s that would have been stuff like Folgers coffee, Tide laundry detergent, Valvoline motor oil, etc. Even if you didn't really care about the driver/team, you would purchase products from companies that sponsor stock car racing.
So for poker, I like to watch poker on tv. So I used the stock car method to come up with a short list of sites to consider. These are the sites that either provided content, or bought commercials for poker on tv. These were the most prominent sites at the time.
For no special reason, I tried PokerStars first. Coming over from Yahoo, the play seemed blazing fast. I had trouble keeping up with it all at the start. But after not too long I got used to the pace. The user interface is pretty good. One thing I didn't like at all at first was muck losing hands. On Yahoo everything is shown at showdown. With muck, it's a bit harder to tell how skilled people are and what they are losing with. But I got used to that after a while and now I hardly notice it. I always muck myself now of course.
Starting with the standard 1000 play money, I got it up to 200,000. Moving on from limit, I just played no limit sit n go. Most of it was made playing play 10,000 sng at 2 and 3 table tournaments. I started the 2-3 table tourneys by necessity. When I started out doing play 300 tournaments, the sngs filled up so fast I could never register into one. So I just played the 2-3 tables instead. This was a fortunate thing as I found I enjoyed the 2-3 table tournaments. When I moved up to medium stakes play there were fewer players and I could get into the 1 table tournaments. But I didn't enjoy them. I never really got comfortable playing the one table sngs. So after a while I just said screw it and went back to playing just the 2 and 3 table tourneys.
I find PokerStars has a very good tournament structure. There are poor players, however there are a few clueful players too. Overall the players are better than on Yahoo, which isn't saying much.
I learned a lot about no limit and tournament play. At this point I feel I've learned about all I'm going to at play money sng. The next step is to graduate to the next level and try out low stakes. Unfortunately there are some complications in my personal life that will delay this by a few weeks. Those problems will be overcome and I'm looking forward to taking this next step. I'd also like to play low stakes limit, so I can take a break from sng for a little while and practice up at limit. Strange thinking about it now that around one year ago I couldn't tell you if a straight was better than a flush; or if three of a kind beat two pair.
I've enjoyed playing PokerStars, and I'll continue to play there.
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