Drops Last of PRO Player Sponsors while Dealing with Unprecedented Cheating Scandal.
Absolute Poker announced they will no longer be using professional poker players to endorse their brands in the US domestic market, but will continue to do so internationally. The pros affected include Michael “The Grinder” Mizrach and Mark Seif. This is by and large a result of the US legislation for online poker and Absolute and Ultimate Bet now appear to want to cut off that association as political strategy.
This comes at a time when Absolute Poker is struggling with security issues involving several cheating player that were together, were able to dissemante live-play hole card infomration to a tournament player, who eventually won the tournament.
If you have read any popular poker forum online you can undoubtedly come up with a never-ending slew of bad beat stories that can fill a weekend's worth of useless reading. Some forums actually have separate sections just to manage the foul hand histories along with the depths of despair in one dark little digital corner, just so you actually have the option of going in there if you so choose.
What you will find though, on your travels through suckoutville is that most of these bad beat stories come from the lower limits of play. This is not to say that bad beats are more or less common at different levels but just that the players in lower levels lament over them more often. Most pros know to stay away from that kind of sorry talk, especially when they know they made the right move at the right time.
Absolute Poker is no different when being mentioned as experiencing the baddest of the bad beats with frightening regularity. One of the things that players should keep in mind though is that in the lower levels a lot of players simply don't care, or can't fathom they are behind in a hand and will quickly push their chips into the middle not having a clue how far behind they may be. That doesn't have anything to do with Absolute Poker, or it's sister site Ultimate Bet, it has a lot to do with the low limit tournament player's lack of skill, patience, and level of carelessness. (Yes, players will enter a tournament and NOT care about the outcome).
Absolute Poker has been tarnished, but still fight on to capture a decent amount of market share as they are really still no too far behind the big players in the online poker market.
This is one of the underlying reasons that playing in the early stage of a tournament, whether it be a sit and go or multi-table version in the low buy-in levels requires passive play, not aggression. Of course you won't hear too many pros saying that, but they don't play the low limits either except for Chris Ferguson. And when Chris Ferguson does play in the low limit tournaments, he plays far tighter than he would even the WSOP tournament.
The reason to play passive is to trap over aggressive players that think they can run and bluff in the 2 buck tournaments, and let me tell by volumes of experience, that is a completely foolish strategy. Opponents at this level will call any draw, any pair, any ace king or queen high. YOU CAN'T bluff them because they are virtually un-bluffable.
Now there are good players in almost ANY online tournament, but they are the ones that are there at the end of the tournament, not the ones you play in the early stages. In that sense yes, you can open up your play after you have reached in-the-money or nearing the final table. You see aggressive play has always been the domain of professional players but that's because of the stakes involved.
Would Phil Ivey call all-in the first hand with A9s at a $120,000 Poker After Dark table? Would the likes of Mike Matusow push all-in with pocket 33 on the first hand? Absolutely not. Plays like these happen all the time at the $5, $10, $20, even $30 buck tournament tables with alarming frequency. So the best strategy to counter the fools and avoid the bad beats is to wait patiently for your hand and trap the monkeys.
Absloute Poker site ratings:
Graphics 6
Traffic 4
Rake 5
Ease of Competition 7
Sign Up Bonuses 4
Player Loyalty Bonuses 3
Promotions 5
Player Support 5
Financial Security 6
Transaction Processing 7
Absolute Poker recenty took over Ulitmate Bet and together these poker sites have some of the best, most reliable software on the internet. True the site took a beating during the PotRipper scandal but that was nearly a year ago now and they are still marketing and growing the poker site, which is a good sign for long term security.
