Where's the Party?

I recently received a mailed invitation from Party Poker.com inviting me to download their program and become a real money player. In return, I get a free seat in a $20,000 freeroll this coming March 2 and a restricted $50 to be used in their casino.

I don't know where they got my name and address, probably in a poker database somewhere. But its not a bad deal. So I went ahead and transferred $100 out of my Pokerstars account to moneybookers and from there to Party Poker. I had to do it like this because Party Poker for some reason does not accept Click2Pay and that is where most of my funds are.

So now, I'm a Party Poker player. Heheh ... I'm such a sucker for these promotions.

So I started to browse around the site and saw the usual SNGs. It started from buy-ins of $3, $6, $11, $22 and so on. What I found strange was that the buy-in amounts where whole amounts. Meaning other sites would usually reflect it as let's say $3+0.30 or $6+0.50, but Partypoker did not follow this convention.

When I checked further, I discovered something that was surprising. I found out that their $3 SNGs were actually $2.40 + $0.60. This is a whopping rake of 25%. Their $6 SNGs were actually $5+1 for a 20% rake. It only began to normalize at the $11s and $22s which was an acceptable $10+1 and 20+2 for a standard 10%. This rake structure was the same whether you played normal, speed or turbos. A case of fleecing the low limit player ?

Compare this to the rake structure of Pokerstars and Full Tilt. And one will immediately realize that you are better off playing at PS and FTP. $2+0.25s are raked around 12.5%, $6 + 0.50s are actually only raked 8.3% and $11+1s are raked 9.09%. Same goes for the $22+2.

In essence, $6.50s are actually the most cost efficient tables in terms of rake. I didn't realize this before since I never actually did the math until now.

So the question is. Without any other incentive besides the freeroll ticket which I already got. Why the heck should I play SNGs here?

Oh well, I'll take a look at some of their MTTs and maybe I'll burn the $100 there. Or I'll just withdraw the money after I play the freeroll. =)