I opened an account with 888 and they give you $2 cash and 6+ special $1 SnG tickets. I played the 8-max choice for the $1 ticket (40-ish man field? awful structure: 7min levels, pretty shallow, no antes until very late) and shipped it for $10.80! Hah.

I played a $2 $250GTD tourney with the free cash (I think it just made the guarantee, so pretty small field) and I just about made the money. I could have taken the min-cash but I was playing to go deeper so I took a shove-squeeze spot from the CO with a middle pocket pair and lost a classic flip when I was called. This tourney started a bit deeper but it still seemed to play pretty fast even with 10 min levels. I’ll have to compare the blind jumps to Stars.

I have to say, I didn’t know what “soft” really meant until I played these couple of tournaments. I thought Stars was full of soft spots at the micro stakes but…wow! People were totally unaware of table/stack Dynamics.The hands people were opening with in EP and calling 3-bets with was like a Friday night playing $1/$2 live with a bunch of drunk tourists.

One V, late in the SnG, 3x-opened from a 9BB stack and folded to my SB shove. People were 5-6x opening with trash, calling any size 3-bet and folding the flop. There was a hand where I had KK in a big 3-bet pot, shoved the Qxx flop and a guy called with AJo. In another I flopped a set OOP and checked to the raiser who checked behind. On the turn I bet about half-pot and V called. On the river I over-bet the pot (leaving out some details) and V called after making second pair on the turn which became third pair on the river. It was bizarre.

My overall impression of 888’s software feels a bit old. Not as snappy as Stars and missing some features like bet interface customization. A few times I could type a bet for some reason so I had to use the slider increments. The animations are slow and I turned most off. There are some themes available on the internet but I’ll stick to the stock one for now. I like the breaks are timed and the info tab.

I look forward to playing a few more of their MTTs. I’ll probably just play $1s with my huge $10 bank role just to get used to the interface some more. That said, if the fields are always like this (softness and size) then I can see why people have a lot of success building a bankroll with less variance there.