Party Poker’s latest promotion strikes me as geared to players who apparently don’t do anything but play poker:

http://www.partypoker.com/news/items/free_ride.html

Take a Free Ride with our amazing commission–free offer

Commission–free play is the dream destination for poker players – and now we’re giving you the chance to get there.

Once you’ve played for 160 hours, you’ll play with no table charges or fees. And we don’t mean for just a few hands; we’re offering up to 80 hours of commission–free play.

To qualify for your Free Ride you must play a minimum of 160 hours within a 30-day period.

Let’s take a very small step back to examine this. If we play 160 hours in one month, the next 80 hours that we play (within that month) are rake-free. That’s a pretty cool campaign, for players who play 8 hours a day, weekends included. But don’t grind TOO hard, because the terms state:

Only the first 16 hours played in each day will be counted toward the players target and commission–free hours.

And before you get any clever ideas about sitting out at a $.05/$.10 limit table for 160 hours and then play $10/$20 for the last 80 hours, consider that

The refund payment is based on the average commission* on play over the entire period of 30 days and a refund payment is made on the portion over 160 hours and up to a maximum of 240 hours (*the average includes commission and tournament fees)

So in short: Eh? If I work my ass off and play 240 hours, this averages out to a maximum of 33% rakeback for that month. But maybe there are some very high volume grinders at Party who will benefit from this. I sure am not one of them, though. But I can’t help wonder how many people fail to read the T&C and really do play nickle-buy-in games for 10 hours a day for the next three weeks, thinking that they’ll make out like bandits.

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