[MicroBob]

Last year on Feb 1 they announced a promotion right at midnight that if you were one of the first 20 players to earn 30k points that week you would get the cruise package ($12.5k in value total...tourney-entry $10k).


They weren't doing the 'regular points' thing for their promotions then.

Happy hours (3a-1p) for double 'bonus-points' was important for this reason (wouldn't matter now that they do 'regular' points for their promo's).

4 tables (the maximum then) of 10/20 6-max.
1 downswing and I would have been back at 5/10.

Most people in the Zoo and on my blog thought I didn't have much of a chance to get a seat. all 20 seats had already been awarded to people who just referred 23 people on fake-accounts (the number you needed to get 30k points I think) or 'teams' in frat-houses or something were playing non-stop 24-hour stretches or that some people knew about it ahead of time and made enough $500 deposits the week before to get all the points without having to do anything else.

I stuck with it though not even knowing if I was 'drawing dead'.

6k points the first day (dinner and basketball game plans for that evening)
8.5k points each of the next 2 days
9k points the last day (just to be sure I got there).

20k hands in 4 days while 4 tabling to make it to 30k points.
This was about 14-15 hours per day I believe including about 16 or 17 hours on the last day.

the last day was really awful, my stomach hurt from all the coffee and soda, and I was a total freaking vegetable.

I started off with a decent upswing to keep myself going.

by the end of it my vision was blurry and I was making REALLY terrible mistakes (raising and re-raising my flopped straight after the board had double-paired, not seeing 4-flushes on the board, etc etc).

I finished -20BB's for my 4 days which i thought was pretty damn good all things considered. I had been up 150BB's at one point though.

They notified me a few days later that I indeed won the package...and on the cruise I placed in the money (177th out of 735 for $5210).

The cruise was awesome hence the reason I'd like to go again.

If they really are only giving out 5 packages to the first 5 people though I suspect there will be much more competition for it this year (lots of you guys trying it mostly) and that it will be more difficult to attain.
I'm hoping they don't do it that way and that there are more packages to go around.

One week after I won my seat they did another one where it was the first 10 players to earn 15k 'regular' points in a 7 day stretch.
I think they just threw out any people who tried to claim it via fake-accounts they signed-up or other weird ways. A couple people in the Zoo were whining that they played by Party's rules but got turned down because Party doubted the validity of the 23 referrals.

I met one 2+2'er on the cruise who told me he followed my lead and played the BBJ tables the 2nd time they did the promotion (faster point accrual on BBJ).


I also met my original party affiliate whom I was NOT getting rake-back from.
He gave me $50 when I signed-up or something (I was just a 1/2 and 2/4 player part-time player at the time and knew nothing about rake-back).

I suspect that he had me on MGR (just assuming) and that it was my play alone that got him the money to buy himself onto the cruise (maybe hewon his way on...not sure) .

I obviously generated a ton of rake that week for him and he made probably made quite a bit of money off of me.

hey, more power to him I guess.

(I have since closed that account when he did not want to provide me any extra incentives to continue playing under his tracker).
not sure I should name that affiliate or not.

Anyway, a big change for this year would be the fact that you can play more than 4 tables max and there are higher-limit tables above 15/30 and 10/20 6-max where you can earn points faster than the lower limits.

but how many out there are really gutsy enough to try to 10-table to 10/20 6-max or the 20/40 full-ring or somethng like that?

Anyway, that's the whole story.

I'm currently half-heartedly doing the promotion on UB for 150k points (300k raked hands) for a Bellagio $25k entry in April. But it's a real battle and I'm not committed to going all the way with it. If party's terms are favorable then I'll do that instead.