Planet Mark's Blog. Thoughts, News And Strategy For Poker Tournaments Of All Size

WSOP Challenge Update Week 1

In case you missed the intro post – this update is part of Greg and Mark’s World Series Satellites Challenge. We are taking $500 each, and using it to play a variety of satellites to this year’s events. Of course the ultimate goal is for one or both of us to win a trip to Vegas, though if we end up without a win then the winner will be decided based on who got furthest at the most different sites.

Another advantage of having this challenge is that we can try out a lot of games at a lot of different sites. You’ll find plenty of webmasters ‘recommending’ things on poker websites… strange how every single one is the very best, and the lack of details suggests they may not have even played…

I have a detailed section for satellites here at SNG Planet, the most recent update was the qualifiers at PokerStars (to be fair they usually hold more Vegas qualifiers after the SCOOP, so there might be another update required).

World Series Challenge – Week 1 – Marks’ Update

Balance Remaining: $485

Tickets / Tokens Outstanding: None

Ok, straight out with my disclaimer, I have been busy with both work + generally enjoying myself and not played too many games. In fact I only tried 2 things, a $15+$1.50 qualifier at Titan and a couple of PokerStars Steps.

The qualifier at Titan was to a $109 game which itself fed into one of their regular $525 supersatellites. This was a small, with only 25ish players. What I liked about this game is that there were 8 ‘buy-in + fee returned’ places (might not have been exactly 8, I’m going on memory here, was a large number compared to other sites though).

The standard of play was terrible, as you would expect at iPoker. I saw a raise, re-raise, cold 4-bet overshove and the original raiser calling with King-Eight at one point with 40BB effective stacks, hmmmm. I was the bubble boy on this occasion, picking up the ‘wooden spoon’ prize of $2. Will certainly play more of these games, the standard of opponents at Titan make them massively +ev.

More on Titan Poker (iPoker) WSOP qualfiers here.

The idea with Steps was to collect some Step 4 tickets and use them to enter any $215 tournaments which pop up after the SCOOP finishes… I won Step 1 on my first try and then bubbled Step 2, getting $7 back for my troubles – a net loss of 50c. That’s $15 gone so far, and only a 1 out of 10 for effort. I’ll play a bunch more and have a more interesting update for you next week!

World Series Challenge – Week 2 – Greg’s Update

Balance Remaining:  $471

Tickets / Tokens Outstanding:  1x Step 2 Entry

Greg focused his efforts on 888 Poker this week, specifically the first step of their qualifier series which are $5.50c freezeouts or $1.10c Rebuys. The standard of play was crazy in these games, with all that cross over traffic from the 888 Casino and the recreational nature of this site this was expected. With small fields (up to 50 players) there were plenty of limpers willing to call all-ins with the same trash they limped with and very fast paced games, with 1000 chip starting stacks and fast blinds the final tables came very quickly. Up to 5 Step 2 tokens + money places for the runners up were on offer.

Greg is claiming he ran a little bad to start off the challenge – I’m not sure he was trying hard enough and have asked to see a few more Stage 2 and 3 entries for next week!!!

One thing is for certain, my recommendation of 888 as the softest site for qualifiers has been validated – I hope to get the chance to play there myself before the challenge is over.

Find out why I made 888 my top pick for WSOP qualifiers here.

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