Just North of Wrigley Field

posted by James - 4:57 PM

For those who visit the Full Tilt Poker Academy regularly, this is probably no news to you, but it might be. If you play for cash on Full Tilt Poker, you should be visiting the FTPA on a regular basis and participating in their challenges. Even if you don't actively pursue them, you'll probably luck into some credits you can spend in their store, whether you're playing in SNGs, MTTs or cash games... even low-limit ring games!

That's right! If you haven't been over there yet today, they just released their latest FTPA challenge, lesson and Sit-N-Learn: Playing Micro-stakes with Eric Froelich. Oh, boy, does this make The Bear happy to have yet another lesson FTPA geared towards my level of play. I'm admittedly a very bad ring game player. I rarely have winning sessions, so I'm very interested to see if this will improve my play while giving me the added bonus of building up credits I can use alongside my other bonuses to offset any losses I may incur, which I hope will be lessened with my FTPA learnings.

Of course, I've gotten some great mileage out of Allen Cunningham's challenge Medium-Stack Play, as I am mostly a MTT player, and took advantage of the last SNG Madness promotion to knock off a couple rounds of Aaron Bartley's SNG By the Numbers and Howard Lederer's Mastering the Bubble.

I haven't yet delved into Erick Lindgren's The Final Table Challenge yet, but the reward looks to be great for the difficulty of not only making a final table in a MTT, but encountering the situations necessary to complete the challenge. Of course, being in those situations is something all of us Podsters strive to achieve, yes?

Also, it's getting towards the end of the month, which means, if you haven't already, you're running out of time to qualify for September's $5k SNL Freeroll. Not that it is very difficult... and i've copied over this "tutorial" from another post I made here on The Pod. If you're interested in padding your bankroll with very little risk, there are few easier ways to do it than this promotion.

With every lesson on the Full Tilt Poker Academy, there's a "Sit-N-Learn Quiz" that goes with it. All of the challenges you may be participating in have a lesson and a quiz. The lesson's take between 10 and 20 minutes to review and the quizzes are all seven questions and take no time at all. They set you up for a ridiculously juicy $5k freeroll.

1) Take and complete the quiz. Even if you just randomly answer the questions, just make sure you take at least one quiz every month. Everyone who takes a quiz qualifies for that satellite. The easiest for me seems to be the Rebuy quiz or Online Tells quiz... very little turn out for those quizzes so it's very easy to qualify. However, you can do all of them if you like. They're very instructive.

2) On the day of the satellites, register for one or as many as you like... it doesn't really matter as long as you register since everyone who registered last month qualified for the freeroll! Top 100 qualify and most were lucky to get 50... although that might change now with Podster turn out next month. HA! For some reason, they play to the end, so you can stay around and play them for practice, get reads/tells on your possible opponents, your mileage may vary. Back when it was a more popular and more difficult promotion, I had 10 of these satellites open at once. I think I took down 8 of them. It was an interesting experience. The next round of satellites are Sept. 12. Mark it on your calendars, set a reminder on your iPhone. Ask your brother to remind you, whatever.

3) Show up for the $5k freeroll the next day. Last month there were only 333 qualifiers!!! 90 got paid!!! $20 bucks for a min cash!!! I hope I don't have to use any more exclamation points to make sure there's some maximum Podster representation next month, but here's a few more!!!!!!!!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the people who were going to do this already knew about this, but just wanted to spread the word a little more, just in case. That is really one of the more ridiculously juicy promotions Full Tilt has ever done and I would love for them to keep doing it, but I really can't see how they can keep dumping 5k per month when nobody's showing up to play.