Spade Club, Non Cash Play Sites
For the small stakes poker player, the internet can be a very frustrating place. I think the main goal for someone who plays with under $100 online is to take something small and turn it into something big. In real life, I don’t think anyone outside of high school kids would play a 90 person poker tournament for $6 apiece. It’s just not a tangible risk/reward for the amount of time you’re going to spend playing the game.
Online, of course, things happen much faster and a 90 person game can be done in 2 hours, while playing other games at the same time. The turn something into nothing concept is also prevalent in multi-table tournaments (MTT’s). Events for $5 that have thousands of players where the top winners get maybe 200 times their buy-in are all over the internet. Anyone can get in, no one’s going to lose much money, and a couple of people are going to hit it big.
But for me anyway, without a big score after a few months, I just seem to be pushing that hundred dollars around without much profit. I’m not losing, I’m not winning, and I’m looking for that big score. There are other sites, like Card Player’s Spade Club, where you pay a monthly fee to be an exclusive member. You are never playing with real money, but you risk points to win real either more points, real money, or trips/entries into bigger events.
So, it’s the ultimate risk nothing win big format. It’s not play money, it has a value. Players who do not pay the $20 a month cannot enter in many of the poker tournaments, so they cannot win the big prizes that members can. Every day there are freeroll events for cash money, once a week there is a $5k prize pool event, and once a month is a $30k event. The fields are much smaller than normal, a few hundred for satellites and maybe a thousand for the big guarantees. In tight economic times, sites like these might be a good alternative to playing small stakes on standard gaming sites.
