Sky's Not The Limit

I have no intention of scouring the whole internet for the best or most interesting "deals" out there - there just is not enough time. Even as it is, I reckon I only would have time to actively play on one or two sites.

However, I was reading some really bad comments about skypoker.com. The people complaining about it were vociferous in their complaints about the terrible players and the horrendous outdraws, and so on.

Obviously this sort of moaning goes on all the time. I am a devout non-skeptic, so I don't pay the slightest attention to any claims that such-and-such a site is fixed etc. What caught my attention was that if the play was as bad as the posters said, then surely there had to be value.

So, I thought ... let's have a little look. The sign up process was very slick, I must say. The GUI itself isn't too bad either. The players on the site are absolutely horrendous like you just can't believe.

I have never really gone in for trying to select sites for their bad players, because I assumed that differences would tend to be competed away. But to say "soft as butter" would be a woeful understatement. The poker use of the term "ATM" would be aptly applied here.

I virtually tripled my buy-in in the space of an hour.

There is one big problem. The gameplay on the site is unbelievably slow. On a 6-handed NLH table, the hand rate is 8 - 10 hands per hour !! That is half the speed of a self-dealt live cash table. It is 5 - 10 times slower than I'm used to in online poker. It's a crushingly boring pace.

The fact that it is almost impossible not to make money is some considerable compensation but I'm not sure I will be able to stand playing there for long.

We'll see. One secondary problem is that now I would be terribly ashamed to lose money there. I could imagine how this would happen, though. I would notice that it's so incredibly soft that I'd want to take as much cash out as possible, as quickly as possible and start playing bigger limits to speed up the process. This is especially likely you happen because of the slow pace - it makes you want to find ways to accelerate the game.

Then, your standard poker variance can kick in and wipe me out. Of course, if we believe the detractors, then the site is bent as a coathanger and in that case I will be even more likely to go bust (cash-out curse) I can't imagine re-loading if this did happen !

I'll let you know ....