Bogus Bonus and a Trick

Well, my ten days of FTP bonus whoring is up. Just in case you're interested to know how much of the $75 bonus I cleared. Heheh... I cleared the staggering amount of $15 playing approximately twice as many SNG games as my usual rate. Bwahahah!!

The good news is I did manage to increase my FTP balance by around $80 doing this, so up yours FTP. Next time you give a bonus, kindly tailor it to the player.

Actually, I see no sense in giving an unreachable goal. It isn't as if people would drastically change their playing pattern. You'll only cause unnecessary frustration because people would think the uncleared bonus is "sayang".

And its not like the company will go bankrupt if they extended the timespan since its just a small percentage. Your objective in giving the bonus is to generate additional rake more than the bonus amount you give. So If I was actually the one in charge of the bonus granting, I'd program it so that each player needs to play around 3 to 4x above their usual rate in the span of time given. This way, the incentive is maximized.

It's like the carrot on the stick, you want to keep it just beyond the reach of the donkey's mouth, so that he keeps on pushing. If you place it too far, the donkey will just realize he can't reach it and give up.

Makes sense? My guess is the bonus granting is probably based on some predetermined criteria. As to what this criteria is, I have no idea but its certainly not playing frequency as it should be easy to determine that giving a $75 bonus to a guy who plays 2 to 3 SNGs a day and asking him to hit it within 10 days is retarded.

Another example of illogical programming is in the merge network. They have this program in place which actually tracks playing frequency and if you haven't played for a while, it automatically sends an email offering bonuses and exclusive freerolls if you redeposit and play again. Sounds like a good program thought up by the resident genius to lure back players. The bonus looks good but its actually one of those unreachable bonuses unless you play 8 hour sessions for a month. And there's a small bug to it and I will share what it is. I don't know if some of the guys who play there already know this as I see some Filipinos there.

What I do is I redeposit a small amount, let's say $20. This would automatically give me the bonus which is fool's gold (see previous post as to what this is) because it is "unreachable" at my playing rate. But I don't really care about the bonus. I only want the freeroll ticket which starts at a $1000 tourney.

But I don't actually play since I don't want to trigger the termination of the incentive program. A week later, I will receive another email, this time offering me a bigger bonus and a ticket to a $2000 freeroll. How is that possible? Well, it seems as if the incentive program only checks if you eventually play. So the bonus and the ticket is triggered by the redeposit but doesn't check if you actually played.

Heheh, you guessed it yet? I redeposit another measly $20 which give me an even bigger unreachable bonus and the ticket. So I now have 2 tickets. Another week passes with no playing and another email and $20 redep gives me a $10,000 freeroll ticket.

So I now have $60 in my account which I can withdraw anytime. Withdrawal will void the last bonus but who cares since I won't be able to earn it anyway. But I now have 3 freeroll tickets which I can use anytime since there's no expiry to the ticket. The freerolls are very winnable because the number of players is quite small compared to the other sites. So a perfect example of something for nothing.

I'm not sure if they caught on to this yet. But I'll post an update on this since I haven't played there for a while in the hopes that I trigger the program again. =)