AdvancedPokerTraining.com’s Madness Cup Levels the Playing Field
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How many times have you thought “Well, if I had his cards, I would have cleaned up tonight”?
What if you COULD have his cards?
Luck can make mediocre players look like geniuses. We tell ourselves that over time it should all balance out, but in the short run, it drives us mad.
Imagine our delight when we found the Madness Cup at AdvancedPokerTraining.com. Free to play, cash prizes, a unique tournament format, and no bad beats! What’s not to love?
Leveling the Playing Field
The team at AdvancedPokerTraining.com (APT) thought long and hard about this problem. What if two players could face off, each being dealt the same hands against the same opponents? You both find yourself in the exact same tough situations.
That would settle some arguments about who’s the best poker player, wouldn’t it?
We love how APT’s unique poker simulation software allowed this possibility to become a reality in the Poker Madness Cup. You and your opponent play the same 100 hands against the same virtual opponents. The game’s greatest inequity, the quality of starting hands, is leveled.
You’ll also get the same board cards. So, your aces got cracked? No problem, bad beats don’t matter, because it will happen to your opponent too. The one who can amass the most chips, given the same (good or bad) luck, is declared the winner.
While certainly entertaining, these challenges can also become an important training exercise. After you and your opponent complete your hands, you can go back and compare your opponent’s actions to yours. You can learn from the lines your opponents’ took, especially when they win more chips than you.
Madness Cup Series
Now combine these head-to-head poker match-ups with one of the greatest sports tournament structures, and this would be APT’s Madness Cup series.
Hundreds of players enter the Madness Cup each month (there is no fee for entry) and play randomly assigned head-to-head matchups (think of this as the “regular season”). For the “play-offs”, 64 (or more) players advance to the NCAA-basketball style bracket, where only the final four will emerge as the victors, with a cash prize in hand.
The other thing we love about the Madness Cup is you don’t have to be online at a fixed time, and it doesn’t take long to play. You always have 24 hours to complete your 100 hands before being assigned to the next match-up. With the speed of the software, and no opponents to wait for, 100 hands only takes about fifteen minutes. After each round ends, you can check where you rank among all players competing and watch replays of your and your opponent’s approaches to the same set of hands.
If you and your opponent both get dealt lousy cards, the winner is the one who mitigated his losses better. If your opponent lost 8,000 chips but you lost only 4,000, you end up with a positive 4,000 point performance. On the flip side, you may have won 10,000 chips, but if your opponent doubled that, you left some value on the table and will be penalized.
AdvancedPokerTraining.com members immediately found the Madness Cup series compelling and exciting. As one series would end, members would clammer for the next to begin. Each time more people play, soon to top 1000 players.
Steve Blay, founder of APT, notes, “We created this mostly as a fun competitive event, and have certainly achieved that based on the feedback we have received. Being a training site, we wanted to make sure that the opportunity for player growth also exists. Many of our players are finding it valuable to go back and watch both their play and their opponents’ in key hands. Poker is at its best when fun, competition, and thoughtful analysis all combine.”
Individual Challenges
The APT team is not one to rest on its laurels. The success of the Madness Cup immediately led them to ponder how this architecture could further be leveraged to create other experiences for members. How about if you could challenge specific individuals to head-to-head matches? Instead of committing to an entire tournament, you can choose to challenge a friend to a competition of 50, 100, or 200 hands that can be completed immediately. Or, if you just want to extend a general challenge to any APT member who wishes to accept, you can do that too. In this approach, you can play as many challenges as you wish at any time.
APT’s Diverse Offerings
Of course, these new offerings are just a small part of the poker training and play that APT provides. For over 60,000 members from 175 countries since 2009, APT has allowed for high volume training in a condensed time window. You can take advantage of their poker tournament and cash game simulation software and play over 500 hands an hour. When you use the simulator, you receive a weekly analysis of your play and a training plan. With all of APT’s other training resources, you’ll likely find yourself crushing your opponents at the tables – and just maybe being crowned Madness Cup Champion.
Final Word
We think the Madness Cup is a breakthrough innovation in the way people can compete in poker and assess their skills. As poker continues to boom, the ability to enhance your skills in a competitive, fun environment offers a unique opportunity. Head over to AdvancedPokerTraining.com and grab a free membership to enjoy the Madness Cup and check out all their other offerings.
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