I arrived home last night pretty beat down, but nonetheless determined to play some poker, it’s been far too long (read: four days). ScurvyDog gave up some details on a little Prima gem, Golden Riviera Poker, so I figured I would give baby whoring a shot. Good god, baby whoring just sounds bad, lets go with mini-whoring. I shot $50 dollars over from FirePay, and proceeded to take part in some fishy goodness.
As suggested, I began at the .50/1 7-Stud tables, which were actually much tighter than I was expecting, with about every third hand getting raked, so I brought up a second table. While GR certainly isn’t the worlds worst, it CERTAINLY doesn’t live up to the self-proclaimed “Sophisticated Internet Multi-Player Poker”. There are a myriad of little things that are annoying, but the worst for me was the fact that I actually have to email support to see how many raked hands I have cleared.
Things began in typical fish schooling fashion, where I lose between 8-10 BB’s on a long odds suckout, and then proceed to work my way back. I was even/up a bit, when I decided that I indeed didn’t like playing here very much and would be cashing ASAP. I went to bed at the normal time, but found myself up again at 1:30 AM staring old man insomnia in the face. Well, I figured this was as good a time as any to finish up those raked hands, so I head downstairs and find ‘The Devils Game’.
No, I did not find a roulette wheel on my main floor. I noticed the 5-Card Stud tab on GR, and decided to check it out. Now, it may be that I’ve completely had my head way up my ass for the last year and a half, but I’ve never heard of this game. Not the way GR dealt it, anyway. The 5-Stud I always knew about, you get 5 cards dealt to you at once, and that’s it. This game was dealt like Stud. One down, One up, then 3 cards face up-one each betting round.
Here is the spot where we find my late night smarts coming to bear.
I jump on the .25/.50 table just to get my feet wet, and for some reason I am OK with the fact that antes are .10, double that of the .50/1 7-Stud game, with a bring-in of .12. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get the strategery of this game. It was basically everyone call every street, and hope for some kind of suckout, which usually came. After one hour, I found myself down $13 Good Lord! Is this really a poker game, or some –EV variation peculiar to Prima? Or am I just a late night no thinking idjit? I suspect it’s the latter, but I’m hoping for the former. I guess I can take a bit of solace in the fact that every hand was raked, similar to a PL or NL game.
Leaving there, I returned to the .50/1 7-Stud to try and get back to my full $100 ($50 cash + 50 bonus dollars) and actually got pretty close, but alas, some late session chasers got there and knocked me back down. Finally, 3:30 AM and I am ready for sleep, so I say fuckit and cash with $85. I can at least console myself that following Scurvy’s advice will find me with a regular $80/mo in bonus money, because only $50 didn’t seem worth the time. That, or I’m just not a good little bonus whore.
So there’s my take on Golden Riviera. Not great, but not bad either. If you should decide to do this one, don’t let the player count discourage you. The funny thing about it was, the lower the player count the more fishy and loose the play at the Stud tables got. Having mini-whored for the first time in ages, I’m now tempted to try to do that Full Tilt thing. Has anyone actually cleared that whole bonus?
Designing the new header yesterday was some good fun and reminded me that it’s been way too long since I spent any time with FireWorks. Thanks to everyone that took the time to leave some feedback on it, I’m sure I will be tinkering more with it very soon..
I’m Thinking Big, but my head is truly Much Bigger.
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