Thursday, September 09, 2010

Not sure I'll be Luvin it

After reading this morning about the various online poker networks, I was reminded that I don't have an account at any of the Everleaf Gaming sites. I had tried signing up for Victory Poker a month or two ago, but the process got fouled up somehow and didn't complete. Just as well, since that PokerNews story this morning informed me that Victory has up and moved over to the Cake Network, where I already have two accounts (Cake itself and Doyle's Room; the latter is the only one I use and the only one with money in it).

PokerNews, of course, is an affiliate for many sites; the news portion is the loss leader that draws you to sign up for online poker, which is how the site actually makes its money (or so I've been led to understand). There was a convenient link on the page of the story I was reading, so I took the path of least resistance and signed up for Luvin Poker. This is apparently one of some 80 or 90 Everleaf skins.

The download and registration were pretty painless. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that I could make a desposit using my Visa card (an ordinary card, not a gift card or anything like that), despite various attempts by my own elected officials to make that impossible (damn meddlers, busybodies, and control freaks one and all). The only annoying thing was that I had to enter all the credit card info separately on two different forms, but I got over that pretty fast.

Want to know about game selection in the middle of a weekday afternoon? It's pretty slim pickins. Here are the single-table SNGs:



That's 1/10 (me) waiting for a $5 NLHE game, 1/10 for a 0.10 Euro NLHE, 1/10 for a 0.10 Euro PLO, and two heads-up tables with one player waiting, with the highest buy-in being $1. I signed up for mine 45 minutes ago, and I'm still the only one registered.

How about multi-table SNGs? Take a look:





Don't bother counting; I'll just tell you that it's a grand total of ZERO waiting for any of those games.

Here's the regular tournament list:



That $5 one third from top, I'm the only registrant at the time I snapped this. It's about to start now, and there are 11 signed up so far. Nice overlay!

Here are the available cash games:



Definitely a lot more going on in cash than tourneys, but if you look more closely, you see that it's essentially all microstakes. If you get up even as high as $0.50/$1, it's an empty wasteland.

Can't tell you about the gameplay or software yet. I'll come back later for that. One annoying oddity I've found so far: You can only have one tournament lobby open at a time. That means that now that I have this MTT lobby open, the one for the SNG I signed up for snapped shut, so to keep an eye on whether it's filling up, I have to go to the main lobby and scroll down the list of SNGs, find the right one, and look at the numbers. That's just stupid.

Game starting. More later.

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