Marketing $101

The marketing people at Full Tilt came up with something called The Biggest Bonus Ever promotion a few weeks ago. In a nutshell, they offered $100 in bonus money to anyone who played a large number of hands in 30 days. The more you played, the more frequent player points you accumulated, which equated essentially to rake back for the player. Each player had 30 days to collect their bonus, which was to be paid in $10 increments based on the number of points that were earned.

I signed up for the deal and started playing like a madman 3 weeks ago. At first I thought FT was crazy to make this offer to everyone. With 80,000 players online FT at any given time, this was $8M dollars they were essentially giving away. (Actually, it's probably a lot more than that, as significantly more than 80K players are members of FT). While I personally liked the promotion, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense for FT. I mean, I'm already a member of their site, so why would they offer to give me $100 just to keep playing there?

In hindsight, the answer is pretty obvious: FT made it desirable for everyone to play as many hands as possible, thereby maximizing the rake the site collected. Reviewing my PT3 stats, I was kind of amazed to see that I've played something like 20K hands during the month of August so far, which is about double what I normally play in any given month. That's a LOT of poker.... and a LOT of rake.

Also, I'm now massively multi-tabling on a regular basis as a side effect of trying to clear my bonus. In other words, FT has gotten me in the habit of upping the number of tables I play during a session, therefore ensuring even more rake generation in the coming months. Say what you will about how FT has treated their customers in past months, this is a pretty brilliant marketing ploy on their part. It's like offering to pay a crack addict to use drugs for a month: the more drugs you use, the more they'll pay. Then, when the month is over, the user is even more hooked on the product, and therefore will up their usage. Brilliant and evil at the same time.

Last night I cleared the last $100 of my bonus. So, I should be happy right? Well, yes and no. The good news I earned the $100. The bad news is it cost me about $100. Turns out I gave back probably $75 alone by messing around in$25 NL games that I should not have been playing. My $10NL game has been solid, but for some reason I tend to get the worst beats when I'm dabbling in the bigger games. I've also struggled in SnGs this month, busting out on numerous bubbles in $5 games. The bottom line is the $100 bonus probably cost me $100 to earn. In other words, a net gain of zero bucks. And Full Tilt loves it. They have more than earned back the $100 in rake that they paid me. And now when I sit down to play, I routinely jump into 8, 10, or even 12 games at once. FT got just what they intended from me... and 80K or more other players.

All-in for now...
-Bug