I haven't played on Ignition in a while. So I decided to test it out the newish poker lobby last night and let's say it is better than people think.
I haven't played on Ignition in a while. So I decided to test it out the newish poker lobby last night and let's say it is better than people think.
what was the end result?
I think +$40,500
Email and be self banned
Do not lose it back.
I've won and lost so much playing Ignition BJ that seeing the table makes me uneasy.
What's the ETA on the story so I quit checking the thread
TAKE IT DOWN
So I will kind of post everything that has led up to this score the past few months because without a bunch of events that have happened I would not have been playing any casino games at all.
I put my townhouse in the city on the market back in March and it sold rather quickly and I took a loss on it for about 7k or 10k if you include the shit I fixed there (it was -75k from purchase price at one point) . Plan was to get out of the city and get to a house in the suburbs or deep in the NH woods with a decent amount of land where I can throw down a nice pool or put up a nice privacy fence for my dogs to go nuts.
Well everything was going smooth and we found a house. Plan was to close the sale of ours on the 6th of July and close on the purchase on the 7th. Well in late June I get a call from my loan officer and he tells me the bank is not comfortable doing a loan on this house because the kitchen is technically "below grade" and advises me that most banks will not loan on this and if they do and I want to sell down the road then I could run into the same problems with buyers.
So we move on and I go into scramble mode and grab a storage unit and hire some movers to move most of our stuff there. I start looking for monthly furnished rentals but the market out there is kind of bare for this right now but I think I did find something nice today at an awesome price in a great area.
When the loan got shut down my in laws said we could crash at their place for as long as we wanted till we sorted things out. At first thoughts I thought no big deal because this is a great area and got a pool and an awesome neighborhood and yard but after we got here I realized how much I missed my office etc...
First 2 days here I was just trying to get acclimated to everything as I have 2 dogs and don't want to violate anyones space etc. and just trying to figure out how and when I am going to work with the most peace and quiet because my dogs are both maltese and if you are not me then they can be fucking annoying and one of them follows me all over and he chills next to me every night while I play poker.
Anyhow day 3 here and I have barely played any poker now for a few days which is a lot for me. I tend to not take too many breaks from poker and I am used to having 2 large monitors with many sites and tables loaded and I am now reduced to a laptop which is not ideal and def kills my value but I have to make due.
I finally find the right area of the house where I can sit and grind comfortably without disturbing anyone but the time schedule I am currently on the games I have been a regular in just do not run. So I say to myself "HMMMM Ignition I have not played here for a while". Let's give this a shot
So I open the lobby and check to see of I have any bonuses and I see a $2,000 BTC bonus but you cannot grind poker to clear this. But either way it is still a 2k bonus. So I fire 2k in BTC on there and I now have 2k to play poker with and 2k to play in the casino.
First thing I did was navigate through the new poker lobby and I sit @ a 10-20 PLHE game and got no action. So now I decide to head to the casino and fire.
Now as far as these bonuses go I am not a rookie to them. I have played a bunch of them before as some have good value but I have never cleared one as they are also subject to high variance if you don't take the time to grind them out properly and when I say that I mean play very low stakes with what I feel is optimal strategy until you clear them which could take many days or weeks depending how big the bonuses are and how small you play.
Overall I would estimate I am down 10-20k on these but it is all bonus money from depositing. I think maybe one time I fired off 2k of my own trying to clear one or something so while they can have value I am sure people do this all of the time and fire off like morons.
So I open the blackjack lobby with my 2k bonus money. I believe I fired $100 on 3 spots to start. Not too long later I had like 5k. Now I go to $200x3 spots and then I hit about 8k or so. Then I move up to $300x3 spots and then I run it up to about 12k. Now I fire $500x3. Not too long later I have like $27k or so I think. and then I think I dipped down to about $24k at which point I dropped back to 100x3.
At this point my plan was to just try and play 100x3 and try and clear it. If I dropped below 20k I was going to reduce my bets to $25x3 and grind it out which would have probably would still be going on now. So I ran that up to like 27k or something and then started going 200x3 and then I won a bit and maybe around 32k I decided to go 300x3 again with the plan of lowering my wager to 100 if I hit 27k again which I did
So I kind of set some guidelines for myself and I was following them and as I won more I would raise the action but around this point I decided I was not going to bet over $300x 3 anymore. So I am sitting at 27k and I win more and then before you know it I am at 32k and I am going 300x3. I run it up to 41.5k and then after a slightly bad run I am back down to 28k or something. and I drop the bets back to 100x3.
This was a grueling process but my goal was to bet big and clear the bonus faster and since I now had a ton of chips this afforded me the opportunity to either win big or just drop down and win a good score. I was pretty certain around this point the least I would win is 15-20k
So I am sitting at about 28k and then I get back to the 30s and bump it up to 200x3 and with about 25 % of the bonus left to clear I decided to not go above 200 again. I battled for a while between 31-35k and then I went on a massive rush to close it out as I ran it up to about 46k at one point but when the bonus cleared I had like 41.7 on the table and then I said to myself "get to 42k and quit". I don't know why but 42k sounded better than 41.7 and then I slipped a tad and I had like 40.5 and then realized if I keep trying to get to 42 this will prob end badly so I quit.
There are not many details as far as big hands go but bottom line is everytime I had 11 and doubled it seemed I made 21. If I split and got shitty cards and shitty doubles off splits the dealer could have a 4 and then roll over a 6 for a 10 but they would just bust. It was pretty awesome. For the first 40 % of time played which was 11 hours total play the dealer barely got blackjacks.
SO all in all I just ran super terrific and I think if I had really pressed this at some points I could have won 500k easy or if I was in a real casino which had monster limits this easily could have been a multi million dollar run. But my goal was not to win that much my goal was to get out with 20k after I ran to about 25k
So all in all had all of the preceding events that started this story not have taken place I am not sure I would have fired on BJ and won
But then the plot thickens , today I get this email from player advocacy @ Ignition
Hi Mark,
We’re contacting you as we’d like to discuss some recent activity on your account and would like to do so over the phone.
So I call and the guy tells me I violated the terms of the bonus but they will let me off with just a warning. He tells me that since I took 2k to poker that violated the bonus unless I was actively playing poker at high stakes while playing blackjack. I didn't argue with the guy since it was just a warning but what the fuck is this shit?
I don't see what the difference is. I have played a ton of poker here since they were branded ignition and what is the difference if I get action or not and play hands while grinding blackjack bonuses. I can see banning people from the bonuses if they deposit and then only play with the bonus money and then lose and try and cash out the deposit money but that was not the case with me. I sat in a regular game that I play and got no action @ 10-20 PLHE and 10-20 NLHE while sitting for 11 straight hours so I guess next time I will make sure to grind some poker at the same time.
What he told me people were doing is depositing and then registering for MTTS and putting 2k on microstakes and then taking shots at bonuses and then trying to unregister and cash out the seed money if the bonuses failed.
So my advice to those out there taking shots at these bonuses on any sites is to be very very careful on what you are doing. Either use all the money at the casino table and try and grind out bonuses without tilting or make sure your games are running to play with on the poker side of things. Bottom line is it is a grey area and they should provide safeguards against this on their own and not to pick and choose what is enforced. When I lost my bonuses prior this was never mentioned to me but when I win it became a situation where they issued me a warning
Nice win. What were the stipulations to clear the bonus? How much did you have to wager to be eligible to cashout?
What China did was actually the correct bonus clearing strategy. It's known as the "Go big or go home" form of bonus clearing, and it's effective because it induces high variance, which is what you need when clearing bonus money. If you attempt to grind bonus money at low stakes (and therefore low variance), the -EV of the games will get you, and you will go busto before clearing it.
Bovada/Bodog/Ignition has long had a rule where your bonus money only kicks in AFTER you bust your regular roll.
Therefore, people will do things like making dueling sports bets (just giving up the vig), registering/unregistering MTTs, and sitting with big buyins at empty cash tables, in order to temporarily "drain" their main balance, and then start playing only with bonus money.
Ignition clamped down upon this BIG TIME in 2017, locking many bankrolls and refusing people's cashouts of any winnings. In some cases, they confiscated entire bankrolls when cashouts had already occurred undetected.
I am surprised that they let China off with a warning, since they have gotten very hard line about this in recent months. I guess that's because he has a long history on there, and has never done anything like this before.
Anyway, China, I would suggest cashing out the majority of that before they change their minds.
I can buy some of the BTC off you when you get it (but not all 40k).
Here is the part though that is grey, the guy told me that what I did was fine as long as I played poker. I tried to and they could look at the tables and I never sat out.
But my question would also be exactly how much poker does one need to play?He just said no microstakes and no registering and unregistering from mtts
Either way like you said I have never tried to take advantage of them on any of these bonuses in the past and even if I had sat with the full 4k I shot off huge from the start
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