Pounds of flesh

After a steady diet of tournaments the past month or so, I've not felt like playing them the last couple of days and have been more focused on cash games. Fueled by shameless bonus/rakeback whoring, I added two new sites yesterday, Sun and Mansion.

Love the Sun interface. Clean and cool, icon-free. The best I've seen. It's not a good place to bonus whore at low limits, however. A $50 max bonus is earned with 250 points. A hand with a rake of $1 or more earns you one point. Hands with rakes of .25 to .99 earn you a quarter point. Whatever. I might earn it eventually, but I won't chase after it like a common whore standing legs akimbo on a seedy, trash-strewn street corner. Even whores deserve some dignity. The real reason I signed up at Sun is the 32 percent rakeback offered through rakerebate.net. I'm waiting to see what that will add up to in the next month.

I decided that my game needed a currency switch as well. I'm playing exclusively for pounds sterling on Sun. As it stands, the dollar is worth a whopping .55p, which makes my table range .25p/.50p and .50p/1 pound. (If someone knows where that pound character is on the keyboard, chime in.)

I especially like the pounds tables because all the players are Brits, evidenced by the fact that they're all from some place that ends in "ham" or something-"by-the-Sea" and sport poofy screen names. Rotten-toothed bitches. I've decided to hate everything British since sitting at a table in Vegas (twice, no less) with a drunken East-ender who managed to give even rampaging beer-fueled Soccer Hooligans a bad name. That's right England, I'm at war with you and your whole bloody country because of that feckless 'wipe. Fire your chips -- and your fish -- when ready.

The sweeeeeet deal that's available is brought to you by PokerSavvy and Mansion. You sign up for Mansion through PokerSavvy and wager $50 at the poker tables or casino, you earn 900 SavvyPoints, which equals something like an I-pod shuffle or, for those who sign up in the next week, $90 to Neteller or Paypal.

Easiest $90 I've ever earned. I qualified in one hand (after topping off the tank)with A-K vs. some bozo's A-J at a .25/.50 table. Noice. Mansion has some kind of slow-rolling bonus program, too, but I haven't taken the time to figure out how it works.

My tournament ennui is also symptomatic of a brain-grinding hangover caused by my awful final-table play Tuesday in the WWdN. Same ... stupid ... mistake -- calling (J-J and then A-Q) instead of re-raising -- two hands in a row. Re-raises would have put A-10 and then A-9 to the test. They call off all or most of their chips with those hands preflop and I lose, fine.

I laid waste to what had been such a beautiful tournament. Good cards early and unfettered aggressiveness had given me much and two badly played hands swept it all away.

Because it's what I do, I still played two tournaments last night, PokerSavvy's generous blogger freeroll and The Mookie. I did not get cards or very far in either. I'm in for the DADI7 tonight, but don't like my chances.

No big deal, though. More important work awaits me. I have a whole country to beat down.