So, Dave sent me a link a while back where they give out free money at a poker site. There are conditions attached obviously, and they only give out money to 25 people a day, but I was awake when the counter reset the other day, so I signed up. They send you an email, and you have to call them at an 800 number to confirm that you’re you and all that, but at the end of it, I had $75.01 deposited into a real money account on a poker site.

The main catch is that you have to play 500 hands before you can cash out any of it. I figure that if you just sat and folded, you’d wind up with half of your $75 left at the end of the time. Of course that wouldn’t be much fun though.

So, I played a little poker for real money last night. I lost a couple of big hands, and won one big hand, and wound up down $14 for the night. I started out playing pretty stupidly, so it doesn’t surprise me that I lost a bunch of money. It’s scary playing online, cause there are a lot of really stupid people out there, so you’re tempted to take a chance and try to take their money on hands that you know are easily beaten. The problem is that with so many stupid people out there playing, chances are really good that you’re beaten by at least one of them, unless you’ve got a legitimate hand. I know this. I still didn’t play that way though. I was just another one of the stupid people paying off the smart people when I didn’t have a hand. Glad that I can learn my lessons without putting any of my own real money on the line. Don’t get me wrong, once my free money is done, so am I - unless that doesn’t happen, and I turn it into a bunch of money…The one thing that I like about having a real money account on the site is that they occasionally have tournaments with free entry and decent sized prize pools. People without a real money account can’t enter though. I think I’ll try my hand at the next one that I see come up (supposedly a $10K prize tourney is coming up in mid January.)

I don’t expect to win or anything, but it should be a lot of fun, and an interesting experience.

Ok, and if anyone is interested in the free money thing, I’ll send you the link. I don’t want to post it here and attract all the poker spammers back (though this post is probably enough to do the trick.)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “D’oh! D’oh! D’oh! I mean…woo hoo.” - Homer