Things had been going so well on Party at the $5nl tables that I thought it must be time to move up. After all, after 45 days on Party I would have to move off the beginners' tables.

My BR had just hit $200 and I thought that would be enough to dip my foot in at $10nl.
It went okay at the start and then on Wednesday I finally hit some bad luck and I lost a couple of buy-ins.
Part of me was happy, guys were getting suck outs against me on the river, paying way over the odds for cards. In the long run this would pay off.

On the other hand, having one's worst day at the tables just after moving up a level hurts confidence and I could feel myself slipping towards bad decisions.

I felt like doing something different so I took out $70 and stuck it into Titan Poker. This had the advantage of qualifying me for a free copy of PokerTracker from PokerLizard.com (anyone used this offer?).

While I was waiting for the PT codes I was toying with PokerOffice. The advantage of that one is that it understands iPoker rooms (which are a bit crap when it comes to, e.g. hand histories).

Anyway I was up $30 or so at Titan, got some deposit bonus and won a small SNG, and decided that I could give the PokerOffice deal a go.

So I moved another $60 from Party and put it in Noble Poker. (Except I didn't. Apparently Neteller had problems and between them and NP they managed to lose my deposit and it took a few hours of phone calls etc to finally get my money).
PokerOffice is available to people who open a Noble account and then accumulate 800 "Crowns". So I thought I'd give it a go.

The trouble is Noble's crowns are hard to get. You get 1 crown per hand raked at $0.25. That means the pot has to reach $5, which at $5nl is no frequent thing. Even $10nl only gets you a few points per hour and a $65 bankroll is not going to support that.

At this point I had an idea. I decided to move up to $50nl. So I was buying in at half stack at a level I wasn't bankrolled for... did I ever read those stickies?
Well, I know I'm not rolled for it; but I realised that at the rate the points rack up at $50nl level I'd only need something like 1000-1500 hands; at full tables that's 100-150 rounds where each round costs $0.75 to play (BB+SB).

I mean, even if I lost my entire Noble roll, I'd I have got a $79 piece of software for $60, so why not give it a go?

Well, it hasn't worked out quite that way. Playing ultra-tight (basically folding and hoping the hand gets a big rake, only betting if I have the nuts, seeing <20% of the flops) actually turned out to work okay on Noble's $50nl tables; probably because a lot of the players are like me, playing over their level for the points.

Anyway, two-tabling, so far I've doubled my original $60 plus received my first $10 bonus and have cleared 500 of the 800 points I need.
All this in a day.

My total BR is now up to nearly $300 (spread over three sites) and I hope once I've got my software I can go back to playing my proper BR (and playing on sites I can get HH for and see if the databases identify some leaks).

Has anyone here played the $50nl tables at Noble? How do they compare with other sites? Are they this weak?
Or have I just hit some luck? (Two good examples. I gave a small raise pf with QQ, flop comes up Q8Q. Another AQ, flop: KJT... )
I mean if they're really that bad then maybe when I've trippled my roll and am actually ready for $50nl then I'll head back to the iPoker rooms.