Sticking My Toe In the Water

Well I stuck my toe back in the water and it is tepid at best. Playing on a very short bankroll is frustrating as hell after having a few years of taking shots when I want. Anyway, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to play some online poker at Lock Poker. Let me tell you, there are plenty of fish in the sea.

When I opened the poker client, I found it easy to navigate after a bit of thought. It wasn’t long before I opened a PLO tourney and watched as an agro donkey build up his stack only to give it away time and time again. I was the happy camper when he doubled me up a couple of time but saw my hopes dash by his brilliant play when he called my re-raise with his 367T rainbow vs. my AAKT double suited, The Q92 flop could not have been better for me but he knew he would hit his 6 and 7 on the turn and river so he called my push and caught up.

One thing I noticed was a deeper payout structure. I don’t recall the exact structure but they pay a few more spots then lets say some of the other poker site out there today. This can be good for some but I would actually like to see it pay a little more to the top finishers. Over all it isn’t to bad.

After looking around a while, I went to the SNG section and saw a few things that would be great for an action junky. They have some kamikaze SNGs that require you to push every hand. What a thrill for the action bloggers out there. The also have some lightning tourneys where everyone must ante 250 chips each hand and thus the pot is huge to start. Not a bad idea but you are all in within 4 hands because you start with 1000 chips. But my favorite part was the double up SNGs. Have the table receives twice their buy-in. I played 4 or 5 of these and have yet to fail to cash. Now they are a bit of a grind but I think they are an easy bankroll builder for the smaller bankrolls.

They also have a few guaranteed tourneys including a 250K. But many of the guaranteed tourneys were re-buys so you have to check the fine print before starting one.

For the FPP players out there, they have gold chips and gold cards that you can earn during your play there. You use there chips to buy into other tourneys, kind of like free rolls, where you can win some cash if you make a deep run.

The only draw back that I saw was when I signed up for one tourney, the table didn’t open. I could tell that the tourney was progressing but I couldn’t get to my table. I sent a quick email to support and then logged off and back on. The table was there but I had missed a number of hands before I was finally on my table. The good thing though was that support sent me an email right away suggesting that I log off and back on to fix the problem. I can think of some other sites where I wouldn’t have gotten a response for hours or even days. I’m sure Lock Poker is looking into fixing the bug and will eliminate the problem in the near future.

My overall impression is very solid. The traffic as between 5 and 6 thousand so not real high but there seemed to be enough for a lower level player like me. I’ll give it 4 out of 5 as my recommendation because of the one issue and that I think they need to add RAZZ to the mix. So if you are looking for an online poker download, try Lock Poker.