Play money: the road to 10,000,000

For a few reasons, the primary one being that I have no way of depositing on PokerStars and I hate freerolls, I have decided to begin a quest to amass as many of the next best thing as I can: play chips!

Following proper bankroll management, I plan to grind my way up from the smallest levels of play money games and hit 10 million chips. The cash games unfortunately have an upper limit of 100/200 blinds, so I may have to grind it out at that level for a long time.

I began my journey a week ago at 1000 play chips, planning to never reload. With some early success at 1/2 games I didn't need to reload and was able to get to a level where I could comfortably play 1/2 games within my bankroll. It took a ridiculously small amount of hands to get to a level where I felt comfortable moving up to 5/10 (I was killing the limit at unbelievable rates). Looks like I'll be at this level for a while as the next level is 100/200.

I'll be keeping track of my results here, for myself and anyone who is interested. I now have 25,067 play chips after 1,104 played hands.

By the way, I am tiling four tables of 5/10 currently. The variance is incredible due to the amount of all ins at this level. Hopefully I'll be at 100/200 within a month and there will be less crazy play. I'm going to move up at 15 buyins normally and drop back down if i hit 10-12.

Im guessing your then gonna sell them and play real money?

If u want i can send u 50K playchips to boost your BR.

Good luck!

I'll sell them if I can; I've heard pokerstars gives out 5 dollars to players after a while and if I get lucky with that I could start real money that way. Otherwise I'll try to sell the play chips.

Thanks for the offer, but I think I'll try to stick to normal BRM (with money I earn) so I can get ready for when I can actually play for real and people won't be helping out.

Good luck! I hit 1.3 million chips on Pokerstars and sold 1 million for $7 on Fulltilt. Havent looked back since and havent had to reload. Once you get to the 200/400 tables with 40k buyins its just about nuts peddling. It plays similar to 2NL or 5NL.

Anyone know a good place to sell pokerstars chips? I dont even need great rates, once i have a few million getting anything for them would be nice.

http://www.bigbadbullets.com/ is where i sold but they wont give you Pokerstars $, they will do like paypal or fulltilt$. apparently starchips is reputable also but they seem to be "full" a lot. Generally chips were selling for 5-10/million when i sold in feb. I got fed up with waiting so i took 7.

http://pokerhex.com is who I used to fund my $$ account long ago. No problem.. back then it was $10/million. Seems it is less now.

When I first started online poker I wasn't comfortable depositing on a site. I started out on UB and there they gave you 1000 playchips to start. Now, this was my first site and I was there long before coming to any websites like this one so I admit I was a little naive about things.

For one I didn't know they gave you more chips. I thought that was all you got, even though I should have known better. So I took the 1000 and played 5/10 PLO until I got to 10,000 then went to 10/20 and at 100,000 I took 50,000 to the 1k/2k table and never looked back.

UB had no restrictions on the number of accounts you could have back then so everyone who played regularly at the 1k/2k PLO or NLHE tables had many accounts so they could dump the excess chips off. You were only allowed to have 21.4 million per account. If you went over and the software "caught" you, it dropped you back to 10 million.

In the good old days you would see people running newly created accounts up to the 20 million mark and then selling them on Ebay for $100 and more. Yes, people were crazy enough to buy play chips on Ebay.

After UB noticed they weren't making money on this they changed it so you could only transfer 50,000 chips per day.

When they changed to the new software it dropped everyone down to 1 million.

I haven't played with playchips on FT or PS.

Yea pokerstars does give our 5 dollars to a few lucky players, I was lucky enough to be one of those certain few. I think that playing with play chips somewhat helps you with poker but not too much. Player with play chips and real money is so much different. I suggest you play with real money but not too much money and just get the feel for playing with real money. You have to get use to playing real money. By the way with those 5 dollars i made around 27 dollars off of that 5 dollars.

Good Luck James. I started doing this about 2 weeks ago. I entered a $530 play chip tourney and finished 2nd and got over $200k in play chips. I started with SNGs until I had enough to do the $40k No limit games. I just passed the $2 million mark today !! My goal is 10 million, at which point I will sell half and keep the other half as a Bankroll to get another 10 million.

I am not sure how much playing Play money will help your real game.
But I wish you the best in reaching your goals.
Good Luck

You're going to have to learn fast how to play real money once you're out of the play. IMO everyone is doing what you're doing. Making play money and selling off, which in recession, which I believe we're still in, drives down prices since no one is buying and everyone is wanting to sell. Though I did make back-to-back final tables in CC hosted frees, I think it's a far better usage of time attaining play money since you can do it when you please. Most sites have up prices they don't pay. The two I could actually get a hold of someone that wanted to buy was: The Hex is paying $3 per mill. and The Moose is paying $5. Big Bullets pays well, but I don't care for playing at Full Tilt. Good Luck.

In many ways its more about learning discipline, bankroll management, and grinding out the low limits than improving my game.

Haha well if he won't take you up on your offer...I certainly would be happy to hehe My name on pokerstars is Alecizzo23. Let me know if you would be willing... I am trying to attemt the same deal.

2000 hands update: bankroll stands at 58,093. Fairly successful so far imo

I hope you have fun doing that.But I doubt that can help your poker skill.And I dont understand why you hate freerolls.I just suggest you building real money bankroll from zero.

People are just dead wrong about this not helping poker skills. I will describe what skills it will help in a second.

Now, you do risk skewing your poker style terribly if you do not approach this logically, but there is a simple bottom line here.

Poker is poker. Period.

It's just that you will be up against a greater percentage of drooling zombies in playmoney than you will be at say.. 200nl.

So you adjust, and play the game that wins.

There is one style that will win here, and it will win all the way up through the micros, and that is the TAG style. That said I never play a TAG style against this level of player, because it is unfun to me. I play loose/passive preflop and tight aggressive post. If the table lets you limp, then limp. Only attempt to isolate with the giant hands.

But why am I telling you this, you are already winning...

But playmoney is fine for developing many skills that remain useful. Reading flop texture, understanding and calculating pot odds, and the real money maker at playmoney is in the enormous amount of implied odds situations you will face. It's just these mountain range sized edges will go away when you advance to cash.

Then.. you adjust again.

Poker is poker.

Ive heard that people sell these things for as low as three dollars. How do they transfer three dollars to your account when there is a minimum of five to transfer.

there is no minimum on stars.

also OP needs to pay more attention to his Stars account imho.

What software is that you're using to graph with?

It looks like Poker Copilot, the Mac program. I use it to and its pretty good. Obviously not as feature rich as HEM or even PT but its the best we have.

I'm just looking for something to track play money and HEM doesn't. Anything like this for windows?

I just saw the transfer. Thanks so much! New challenge: the road to 10 million real dollars?

We'll see how 2 NL goes, I may end up back in this challenge if a couple flips don't go my way :P

Slow and steady my brother! Be a nut peddler for a while.

At 2nl MANY opportunities will present themselves in the span of $5 or so.

I wonder if this one might... I can't tell yet.
http://fpdb.sourceforge.net/

But why on earth are you gonna play with playchips? If you are trying to learn stud your bankroll will sustain a lot of play at 04/08

Argh.... I don't understand why I'm UNABLE to follow bankroll management. Every time I get hit hard with like 4 bad beats in a row, I fall into tilt, buy into the biggest table I can get into, and lose all my playmoney. It's soo frustrating. Why do people do this? Not enough will power?

That's part of it, yes.

The lure of getting unstuck in one or two hands can be strong.

But you also have to understand why BRM is so essential to a good game before you even have a snowflakes chance of practicing it IMO.

Do you?

he's playing some dude heads-up for 10k hands for videos/a sidebet (or something) and doesn't wanna pay rake

Aha. Clever. Is there a site that does playmoney heads up tables?

If you have problems with wanting to use your credit card to make deposits you cant always get one of those visa all access gift cards they have them in 25 50 and 100 dollar cards I have been succesfull with them on bodog pokerstars and fulltilt you can look on there web site to see where you can get them www.allaccessgift.com alot of gas stations sell them or grocery stores

the monies are conditional - you must give updates or i will come to your house and steal it back or something.

Stars does, at 1/2.

Will post updates when I get a chance / if anything noteworthy happens.

First sick loss:

PokerStars Game #28090390505: Hold'em No Limit ($0.01/$0.02) - 2009/05/11 20:21:53 ET
Table 'Menippe IV' 9-max Seat #6 is the button
Seat 1: Terbiyesiz ($5.22 in chips)
Seat 2: Dollarbill80 ($3.29 in chips)
Seat 3: eduardsr ($1.60 in chips)
Seat 5: OneGoodHorse ($0.77 in chips)
Seat 6: MiloLPDA ($1.16 in chips)
Seat 7: maiwolong ($1.64 in chips)
Seat 8: bboy_hectik ($1 in chips)
maiwolong: posts small blind $0.01
bboy_hectik: posts big blind $0.02
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to maiwolong [Ad Qd]
Terbiyesiz: folds
Dollarbill80: folds
eduardsr: calls $0.02
OneGoodHorse: folds
OneGoodHorse leaves the table
MiloLPDA: raises $0.13 to $0.15
maiwolong: raises $0.25 to $0.40
bboy_hectik: folds
eduardsr: folds
MiloLPDA: calls $0.25
*** FLOP *** [4h As 3s]
maiwolong: bets $0.80
MiloLPDA: calls $0.76 and is all-in
Uncalled bet ($0.04) returned to maiwolong
*** TURN *** [4h As 3s] K♥
*** RIVER *** [4h As 3s Kh] Q♥
*** SHOW DOWN ***
maiwolong: shows [Ad Qd] (two pair, Aces and Queens)
MiloLPDA: shows [Ah 7h] (a flush, Ace high)
MiloLPDA collected $2.26 from pot
maiwolong said, "wow"
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $2.36 | Rake $0.10
Board [4h As 3s Kh Qh]
Seat 1: Terbiyesiz folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 2: Dollarbill80 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 3: eduardsr folded before Flop
Seat 5: OneGoodHorse folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 6: MiloLPDA (button) showed [Ah 7h] and won ($2.26) with a flush, Ace high
Seat 7: maiwolong (small blind) showed [Ad Qd] and lost with two pair, Aces and Queens
Seat 8: bboy_hectik (big blind) folded before Flop

not such a happy graph. after a couple bad beats and losing with the 2nd nuts, the 5$ is history. I'm not going to blame it all on luck - I did get my money in bad once and I still have a steal% which is probably too high. Another thing I noticed is that I bet the turn too often after I C-Bet. Well hopefully I've learned something, and its unfortunate that it had to end so soon.