Whatcha Gonna Do With That Shiny Silver Star?
Found myself directly inspired by bigbamboom’s Supernova quest to give myself a much more modest challenge, namely to reach “Silver Star” status over on PokerStars. I usually only put in 10-15 hrs. a week online — and often am splitting that time between three different sites — so I’d never really bothered to consider any of the promotional incentives out there for frequency of play. But I’d played a number of sessions on Stars during the first week of March and when I looked I realized that 1,500 FPPs was something I could reach without too much trouble by month’s end. Am sitting at exactly 847 FPP (or “VPP”) at the moment, meaning I’m over halfway there.
Am wondering a couple of things here as I anticipate graduating from Bronze to Silver status. I see that Silver Stars get cheap entries into a few tourneys, something of which I’ll surely try to take advantage. I’m also poking around a little in the VIP Store to see what’s being offered for those who’ve reached Silver Star status. Anybody have any experience here? How should a Silver Star spend his FPPs? Or should he just keep accumulating & not spend ’em in the VIP Store but in other ways?
What else am I wondering? How the heck is bigbamboom gonna do it? One benefit of becoming Silver Star is you then start earning FPPs at 1.5 times the usual rate. But your rate of earning VPPs don’t change (if I’m not mistaken), so I guess that means more hands and/or higher stakes are the only way, yes?
Will be spending a good part of the week in San Francisco & may well find myself in a cardroom there at some point. If I do, I’ll surely try to report on what I find.
Meanwhile, here’s what happened over on Hard-Boiled Poker last week:
I railed some of the Sunday online tourneys last weekend and happened to see an interesting hand (w/some chat) come up between Cliff “JohnnyBax” Josephy and Kevin “BeL0WaB0Ve” Saul. Wrote a post on Monday about how those guys (and other pros) exist “In the Fishbowl.”
On Tuesday I posted “Tick, Tick Tick: 60 Minutes Looking into Absolute Poker.” I personally think the story is an overall good, but I can see where folks are coming from who disagree with that view.
I heard bigbamboom interviewed on the Two Plus Two Pokercast and wrote a bit about it on Wednesday in a post titled “Rewards (Others & One’s Own).”
On Thursday I shared a little bit of good-natured griping in “‘People Call With Anything’.”
Wrapped things up on Friday with a post called “The Good, the Bad, and the UIGEA.” There I reflected on a couple of UIGEA-related news items from the past week – the iMEGA case being dismissed & the publication of the American Banking Associations’ comments to the proposed regulations. Neither of these items struck me as all that great for those of us interested in keeping the UIGEA monster from gobbling up our online poker any more than it already has.
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Once you have the star there’ll be a new sheriff in town.