Anonymous poker games are expanding through the sites at the moment. They started with Bovada (the US brand formerly called Bodog), then Party introduced them for their heads-up games and now Titan / iPoker have them for lower limit cash games. I tried these games out last night, curious as to how if felt / how being anonymous affected my play… unfortunately the first thing I encountered was a glitch!
The screen shot below should explain it. I was on some waiting lists and sat down in the 10c / 20c game… waiting for the big blind. When it came I posted, someone raised UTG and… well, all I could do was join / unjoin the waiting list and wait for my timebank to disappear!
No big deal, except this game was full of crazy players and leaving / rejoining would have put me 5th on the waiting list again.
Ah well. I had lost my internet connection a couple of times while waiting, so maybe that explains the bug?
I switched off the client and rebooted, which seemed to sort everything out. There were 6 to 8 anonymous 6-max games in progress, plus a few heads-up games (longish list of 1 player waiting for the heads-up, which makes me think that bumhunting is not dead quite yet!!). Buy-ins ranged from 10c / 20c through 50c / $1 – I played both the 10 / 20c and 25 / 50c for a while.
First up the games were looser than the equivalent non-anon tables, a couple had players per flop in the 40% to 50% range. I’m not sure this will last, new games always attract the recreational players, and there were plenty of these around… The A-6 off 4-bet overshove with 30BBs was an exception rather than the rule, but little tells like opening 4x to 5x, limping half of hands, slowplaying to the point of not getting anything at all in the pot with monsters and making small raises out of position with vulnerable hands were all loud and clear.
I’m not actually sure whether my own play was affected or not. Sure, it felt less personal knowing that I was plain old ‘player 4’, but then again, I’m not the sort to feel any sort of attachment to my online screen names (well, maybe one older one that I had to abandon on Stars because it was used for my affiliate activity there!). One thing I noted is that players left after losing a big pot a fair amount. I did wonder if the ability to rejoin anonymously increased this getting up and rejoining behavior? My guess is that this is an advantage of these games – it can feel more like you are starting fresh without your screen names and stats…
Strategy adjustments?
Well, other than resisting the urge to tighten up too much (which leaves way too much value on the table) I can’t think of anything specific for these games. ABC Poker will win you the money! These games will be harder to multi-table, and stats programs will not work at them – meaning we should see the proportion of recreational / fun players vs grinders in favor of the fun guys - keeping the games softer and the profits bigger. Anonymous tables helped Bovada become the biggest US site, it is possible that these games will take off in a big way on the non-US scene too, though I am not yet completely convinced after one short session.
Of course the best time of all to make money from these innovations is when they are brand new while the fun / soft poker players predominate and the grinders settle in!
You can claim an extra $20 cash on top of your 200% deposit match (max $2k) over at iPoker's biggest site - Titan Poker - with my bonus code SNGPLANET. I will ensure that the extra is in your account within 48 hours, usually sooner. Check out TitanPoker.com and hit the ‘Anonymous Tables’ tab on the left hand side of the lobby!
GL at the tables, Mark
Submitted by Planet Mark on Fri, 04/12/2013 - 10:23