9:6:3

This is my current ratio of first to second to third place finishes in $10 SNGs at Pacific :-) Looks nice, doesn't it? I have played 41 such games in total now.

Found out something interesting tonight: Sharkscope also has a live tournament selector. At first, I thought that this was "just" an overview of average strengths of opponents at various levels and poker sites. However, seeing amounts of players like "3/6" confused me and finally it dawned on me what was meant with the word live here. That's right, before you register for some SNG you can go and look at Sharkscope to see what the level of your opposition will be!

Of course, you need to catch the right time window. Some players need to have already registered, but if say 6 players have already registered, you run the risk that by the time you have checked out your opponents the table will be full. Still, could be a useful feature, especially if I move up to $20 at some point. (At that level, it costs you 3 of the 5 free searches to use the tournament selector, at the level of $10 and below it is free.)

I am also thinking about putting some money into Titan again. Mark today writes that he has now officially left Stars for Titan. Pokerlistings is down at the moment, but I believe they ranks Titan as being even easier (#1 on the list of easy-to-win poker sites!) than Pacific (#6). I am quite wary of putting any more money into Titan though. I have lost $80 in total by playing there. Funny,only as I write it do I realize that this means far less to me now than it did when I lost that money :-) Now, I "only" have to win 2 SNGs to make up for this loss!

When I lost that money, I really did not know what I was doing. Through some sort of miracle, I did actually manage to win four of their jackpot games in a row, one more would have brought me $20,000. Of course I went out in 7th place or so. It is quite tempting to play these games again, even if the jackpot remains very hard to reach of course.

Almost forgot, I also played in a large shootout tournament at Party tonight. I never played such a game before, it has quite a funny structure. You start at one table and continue playing there until exactly 3 players are left. Then you wait. When all tables have only 3 players, all remaining players are moved to full tables again and a new round starts. In each round, you get paid if you finish in the top 3! So you get some intermediate prizes and do not go home with nothing if you are kicked out after playing for 3 hours.

However, I do not think that I will play in such a shootout again. It was fun to do once but I had to wait a long time for the second round (my table had an especially large amount of idiots who were racing each other to give all their chips to me as fast as possible, I ended up with 16,000 chips after starting with 3,000). I'm almost glad I did not make it to the third round, it would have made for a very late night here... Eventually I made a net profit of $5.07 on this game, after two hours! I also did not like the fact that the blinds were very high by the time the second round started. My M was 10 and I was chip leader! I managed to survive a couple of rounds, but I ran into KK first and later AA finished me off.