A piece of cake?

Ugh. Cake Poker.

Lured by the dual promise of rakeback and bonus I signed up to Cake Poker last month, joining a new site is pretty unusual for me as I've accounts at a lot of them from the early days when bonuses were very competitive and I'd move from site to site "harvesting" the bonuses. But recently getting a decent bonus offer combined with rakeback is much less common.

The software is fine, easy enough to use if you've played a reasonable number of other sites and convenient to multi-table (this is crucial when trying to work off bonuses in my experience). There's none of the hassles of "click a button here, enter a value there and click another button to place the bet" issues that some sites have.

The players even seem friendly enough, I don't think I ever saw the kind of tirade in the chat box that I've become accustomed to as players get outdrawn in some unlikely scenario.

The rakeback and bonuses are well handled too, the bonuses are paid off in small chunks and the rakeback paid weekly.

What's the problem then? Well, it comes back to those players, they come across as a quiet, unninterested bunch and they really don't like to get involved. The percentage of players seeing the flop (on NL tables as low as 5c/10c, never mind the 25c/50c I started looking at) was incredibly low, the majority were in the 10-25% range (for full ring tables). Now, I'm sure you could transform a controlled aggressive game into a decent return with so many tight players but I found that I'd win lots of small pots then run into the (seemingly innevitable) overpair vs set and lose a large chunk. The net result was a slow grinding away of my deposit as I lost more on the few big hands than I won on the more numerous smaller hands.

I came to the conclusion that the same thing that drew me in had brought in a large number of players grinding out bonuses and being stubborn I kept playing hoping that I could adjust my game to play these tight tables effectively but after a while you've got to cut your losses and go where the games are juicier.