Tnx for advice.
Where you play sng?

We'll allow this thread as long as their are appropriate responses, significant sample sizes, structure discussion, buy-in discussion, and software discussion. We don't have a lot of hands and data from Party Players, so this thread is appropriate this time around. If you feel the need to derail the thread, you will find that there is no warning & will be gone quickly.

How have they been the last 6 months or so? The few times i have signed on they've looked like rock/reg gardens, and i hate that party NEVER did anything about collusion/their crappy software crashes so i took my business elsewhere

I left playing the party 22-55's about 6 months back. I had a number of reasons for doing this.

Mainly the games got tougher very quickly in the space of about a year, mainly the influx of German multitabling nits. 4-5 a table.

The rake wasn't good, more than stars and tilt for quicker games with the steep blind structure. Given there was no way to get a stable under the counter rb affiliate and the loyalty system was a joke.

Added that to the fact party's cs sucks completely. I decided to move to full tilt/stars.

I won't be going back anytime soon.

The only reason to consider Party is if you play the high buy-in SNGs (200+). The $10 cap on SNG rake at 200+ is the best in the industry, to my knowledge. Even then, you'll have to table select religiously. Other than that, the bad software, customer disservice, German pros, and lack of approved rakeback make it hard to recommend Party.

The 210s are softer than the 109s atm, when they run (get like 5 a night tops). The games are ridiculous and i'm glad i'm playing more and more cash/MTTs. No problems with the software here. Just the infinite amount of mediocre regs (myself included of course!) makes the games zzzzzzz

FWIW, i'd say Party has the second best support in the business now (at least for "VIPs" anyway). Stars obviously are the best, but the times i've had to deal with Full Tilt it takes at least a day for a respond and no phone number. Party have a 24/7 phone number which you can ring just to ask for bonuses, which they frequently give. The new VIP system is effectively 30% RB anyway + the low rake. Still, it doesn't make up for the games being absolutely chock full of regs and if I could be bothered to learn Full Tilts player pool and set up a rakeback account I would play there for SNGs.

symphdevil. or something like that except he used numbers as part of spelling is reason i left. too many regs. i think paddypower is sooooooooo much easier to beat regularly. beat it most weekends when i am at home. make enough money from the tourneys and stt to fund an extravigant college lifestyle, roughly 150 euros a week, thats about 200 dollars from about 10 hours work. wish my college internet would allow me access but they blocked it

paddypower is the way forward man but nobody else go there. only realized how easy it was when i was playing there for a while and then went back to party and couldnt hardly survive. fish everywhere. dont worry about table selection at lower levels cos most are terrible. fact. go there man if you want an easy game but stay away the weekends cos that when i come to the table and this tank aint big enough for two sharks

The 22s-55s are just full to the brim with German regs. Put it this way: you're leaping up and down fist pumping when you manage to find one with only four of them in - it really is that bad now... Very sad.

Another bad sign is that the 11s now have 4-5 regs in nearly every SNG during European primetime too. I think it's a "double whammy" of the fact that alot just can't beat the 22s+ anymore (and have had to move down), coupled together with the incredibly bad timing of the introduction of DoN 11s. If the DoNs spread to other limits then I think it'll really be the final straw for Party SNGs.

I'm probably costing myself money by not moving, but I do like the Party blind structure and being allowed to select my seat so am reluctant to move. I'm still holding out hope that some of these German regs will piss off to another site, but I'm beginning to wonder if they are playing now for some ******ed "ps.de gold stars" or something instead of actually wanting to make a profit and hence they'll never leave.

Juk

Ditto to everything Juk said. Im still at Party mainly because of the blind structure too.

The recent "Double Partypoints on Sitngos" was a ridiculous reg-fest on Party.

Meh, I find the 55s real soft. I wasn't going to say to prevent more regs streaming over :P

Well my suspicion when I played there, was that I was competing against guys who had rb which I didn't have, so I felt it wasn't a level playing field. Finding 7 regs registering at the same $22 didn't encourage me either.
I see that sharkscope now covers STT SNGS at Party, so maybe somebody who knows the regs can tell us what rois they are doing (without mentioning names)

You can change your name every 30 days at Party now so Sharkscope won't be that much use.

Juk

EDIT: Hehe, I always suspected a certain player as being a mass-tabling fish and Sharkscope just confirmed it This Sharkscope at Party thing is gonna be fun.

PS.de KILLED partygames that were so awesome before the guys started to get rolled for the highest stakes. The owner of that site makes so much money it is just ridiculous.

Another thing i HATE HATE HATE about party is that it is commonly known ps.de pros rail members of their site who make an FT for a % of the profits, and of course party does nothing because ps.de probably accounts for 1/3 of their total rake

cliffs on ps.de?

I could be off on this, but from what I know they are a site that gives players a free br to start on party ($50) as well as free shortstacking / sng videos. The more you play, you earn 'strategy points' instead of party points, and you can 'unlock' videos from higher profile instructors , or maybe more advanced concepts, I really am unsure of how that portion works.

They have forums and stuff just like 2p2 as well, and annual meetings for members + retreats for the coaches ( I have a couple on my buddylists and imo they are NOT compensated nearly enough for the hit im sure their hourly has suffered)

There used to be very few germans on pp , now there are swarms of them playing optimally

How did ps.de kill party games? By educating all the fish? How does ps.de make the money back that they give out to new players?

They killed the games by directing all of their nitty traffic to Party because the owner probably gets a bigger chunk of MGR than if they sent them to the other big sites. They basically teach new players to play "abc hard to exploit" poker (not necessarily winning) and then send them off to Party with their $50 or whatever (I think they have to pass an "exam" first to check they have actually learnt something). A Lot probably donk it off quick and never return, but the ones that survive stay their and then the ps.de owner gets 25-30% of their MGR for ever more.

It's not just SNGs that they killed by the look of it, but the NL cash games too (all of the lower limits are jammed [even worse than SNGs] with German abc shortstackers because of them).

I can understand why Party doesn't want to do anything to upset ps.de, as already stated by Scotty_12; probably about 1/3 of the rake generated on Party comes from them alone. Interestingly Germany actually had it's own UEIGA come into force in January 2008, but Party made no attempt to ban Germans (like they did with the USA, Italy and France before) - not sure why, and there may be other legal reasons I don't know about or understand.

Even if you don't know German you can still read their forum using Google translator (it actually works quite well for German):

http://de.pokerstrategy.com/forum/

Juk

I went back to Party after their major software upgrade and I've found the $22's and $33's to be quite soft.There are a few decent regs but there are also plenty of poor ones and random fish too.

It's double regs, erm... points again next week. Looks like this might start to become a regular occurrence? If so, maybe Party even realize the SNGs are getting tougher and they think we deserve 40%+ RB to keep the games going? Wishful thinking probably.

Juk

The Party SNG's are quite soft compared to those on FT or PS.

Of course, if you can play on Party you also have access to other non US sites where the action may be even juicier.

I've been playing real low stakes SNGs at Party for ages on account of not having much of a bankroll (I've built it all the way up from one of their "Have $25 to come back and play here!" bonuses about a year ago). I've mostly been playing on $6 SNGs, and just made it out of a large slump and decided to play more $11s, but the tables seem to be full of rocks at any time of day. In almost every game I've played over the past few days it's been getting to stupidly high blinds with most of the table still left, more or less evenly stacked and pushing/calling such nitty ranges that it's all becoming decided by people squaring off with coinflips.

I think I may take my modest bankroll elsewhere.

Is it ZiznChang???

I was hoping the same thing. Fingers crossed, eh? Combination of that and a couple of intermediate Party Points goals in the store wouldn't go down too badly at all.

Hehe, yep it's him.

Juk