Don't play at Party

They gave me another bonus, this time $55, and I lost it in three games, but that is not my reason for writing this (it was not my money anyway :-) ).

Coming back to Party after playing at Full Tilt for so long really brought home to me how different the speeds are. Not just that the levels are different, and increase faster at Party as I explained earlier, but I just noticed something which makes this effect even worse: it takes longer to play a single hand at Party!

Compare:

• at Full Tilt, I played 700 hands in the most recent 7 hours (420 minutes) (however, this number is skewed because I made it to the heads-up phase six times: in the previous 448 minutes, I played 705 hands)
• at Party, I played 350 hands in the last 4 hours (240 minutes), and 577 in the 370 minutes before that
  

This translates to 1.6, 1.57, 1.46, and 1.56 hands per minute, respectively. Again, the difference is not as large as I thought when I started writing (and thought of the title ;-) ) but it is , perhaps, noticeable. If you play for 40 minutes, using averages of 1.58 and 1.51 hands per minute, you play 63 hands at Full Tilt and 60 hands at Party. Oh well, maybe I overestimated the difference. I may have been biased by the unlucky cards I got at Party last night...

Ah now I know what I should do, look only at games where I got eliminated early (out of the money). Then I get

• FT: 55/37, 66/35, 10/10, 54/39, 57/40
• Party: 29/24, 2/2, 26/21, 45/36, 7/6, 68/47

From this I think you can see a clear advantage to playing at Full Tilt: the difference is easily one full round in 35-40 minutes. Given that SNGs do not consist of so many rounds, this is quite important.