Hi, my name is Poker Rabbit, and I'm a bonus whore

The weekend was pretty dismal and I finished stuck about $550 for poker (being on the losing end of set-over-set in three key pots will do that). Luckily, though, I hit a royal flush on video poker while casino whoring and won a little over $1000. That made up for my poker losses and paid for some repairs on my car. If you’re not doing any casino whoring, you really should be – check out this article on Sound of a Suckout for the basics, and the Bonus Whores forums for up-to-date information. The general idea is that although casino games are not beatable, some sites offer enough bonus money to make it +EV to sign up, clear the bonus and leave. Unfortunately, if you are new to the world of whoredom, the glory days are past – the casinos have taken big financial losses from armies of bonus abusers and have tightened their requirements. (Most of the abusers are from Denmark, Israel, Poland, and especially China, where bonus whoring has become a cottage industry and is even indirectly supported by the government, in the form of how-to pamphlets and the like. The Terms and Conditions of online casinos often specifically exclude citizens of those countries, which used to make me wonder what kind of strange bigot had it in for Jews, Danes, Poles, and Chinese.)

Speaking of EV and promotions, I’ve seen a few bloggers mention the Noble Poker $1 million challenge. Noble is offering a million bucks to anyone who can win seven SNGs in a row. If you are a great player employing a highly aggressive bubble strategy and you have a 15% chance of winning any given SNG, in order to have a 50% chance of winning 7 in a row you would need to play about 477,000 SNGs. (The math on this is a bit complicated but the formula can be found here.) That would not be a bad gamble, actually, since you would be investing $477,000 in juice (at the $10 level) for $500,000 in expected value… the only problem is that no one can play that many SNGs in their lifetime. Basically, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to invest time and money in the SNG Challenge. With the astronomical variance, a vast majority of the time you’d be better off taking a simple 25% rakeback deal. Also, the promotion is highly skill-dependent. If you’re an exactly average player with a 10% chance of winning each SNG, you’d have to play over seven million games to have an even chance of hitting the jackpot. And then there’s the chance of someone else hitting it before you, which would (presumably) cause them to call a halt to the whole thing.

I did think of a way to let the promotion work to your short-term advantage, though. Sit down at a table and excitedly tell all the other players that you’ve just won 6 in a row, and if they let you win this one you’ll give them each $10,000. Kidding. I’m not dishonest enough to do this. But it would be funny as hell if it worked.