Lucky > Good

I made my second Royal Flush last night. At the time, I didn't even notice.

I get dealt As Ks in the small blind at a $1/2$ limit table, and several players limp in so I raise and everyone calls. The flop comes three spades, so I am happy. I pause, as if I am scared of all the spades, then check. Everyone else checks as well. Turn comes a red blank, so I bet, as if I have decided no one has the spades. One guy raises and I reraise, and two players call. Turn comes another spade, this one a queen. Perfect, now guys with even one high spade might take a stab at the pot. I raise, and the two others call. I take down the pot ($13, I think it was) with my ace-high flush.

A moment later, someone comments "NICE!". I'm about to give the standard "ty" when another says, "Whoa, that's the first time I've seen one of those." An ace-high flush? I scroll back the chat a bit and find the line "JamesXXXX has won with a ROYAL STRAIGHT FLUSH".

Come to the think of it, the flop was something like 10-6-J of spades. And that queen at the end, a spade. Huh.

It's nice to make the Royale With Cheese, but it really loses something when you have to have it pointed out to you afterwards.

This was on PokerRoom.com, so I got an email in a few minutes with congratulations and notifying me of a $100 bonus deposited into my account for the Royale. What if I had disabled my chat at the time? I wouldn't have even known about the Royale until I noticed the email much afterward. Holy shit, I made a Royale? WHEN?!?

The $100 was very welcome, though, since I only signed up with PokerRoom a few days ago and have been bleeding cash from the start, much to the enjoyment of the local leech squad. Players on PokerRoom seem noticably better than on Party, but that's going to be true for almost any site. But I was also playing scared, since I had only bought in for a small amount and some early losses had me worried I would bust out before making enough Player Points to get my signup bonuses. With the extra hundred, plus some more that I will dump in there this evening, I should be bolstered enough to feel more comfortable and not play so much like a pussy. This is my theory, anyways.

I just signed up on PokerRoom because I found PokerSource Online, via a mention on the 2+2 Forums. Probably old hat to most poker bloggers, but I liked the idea of an affiliate signup kickback site, and with their September bonus I would earn about $90 in goods for each of the sites I signed up at. I went with PokerRoom first because I liked the idea of a Java-based client so I could fire up poker quickly on my main desktop, a Mac, instead of having to boot up my PC game machine. Unfortunately their policy for earning the PlayerPoints I need to get my signup bonus for PSO and my initial deposit bonus are harder than they look. I need 600 points to clear both, and you get points from raked hands, so it didn't look that bad. But hands with rakes less than $.50 earn no points, and rakes less than $1 earn only half a point. So on the $1/$2 tables, I'm only seeing maybe half the hands earning any points, and most of those only half a point. So that 600points will probably be something more like 1500-2000 hands at that level. Ugh.

I should probably have started with Pacific Poker or AbsolutePoker, since their starting hand requirements look a lot more like Party's and only require 300 or 400 hands. Should be able to clear those much more quickly. If I can manage the $90 PSO bonus for each of those as well, it will be worthwhile. I need to get back to that $1K bankroll goal, and making it the old-fashioned way, by good poker play, just isn't doing it for me.

Poker bonus make me drool. Poker bonus make me fool.