Doug Polk’s challenge to make $100,000 playing on a newly established sweepstakes poker site, ClubWPT Gold, will have multiple positive effects on the players.
As we covered earlier, Polk has pledged to give all the profit made during the challenge back to those who sign up for the site using his code, getting some Sweeps Coins back into the economy.
Now, he also managed to get the site to reconsider its rake structure and make significant adjustments across its higher stakes ring games.
With this move, Polk has single-handedly created a better playing environment and made already soft games easier to beat, showing that his opinions carry a lot of weight in the poker world.
ClubWPT Gold Recognizes Error of Its Ways
The whole thing started a couple of days back when Polk took it to X to voice his outrage over a very big rake cap at ClubWPT Gold’s highest stakes heads-up tables.
Staying true to his promise that he’ll share the good and the bad about the site and won’t hold his tongue when there is something particularly problematic, Polk made it clear that rake at lower stakes is actually quite good (which it is), but the $30 cap at 10/20 HUNL did not sit right with him.
So, he decided to boycott the games, even though it is in his interest to play as high as possible if he wants to keep the dream alive and stay within the reach of that $100k profit.
Just like a few days before, Polk’s criticism led to a reaction from the operator, but instead of going on the defensive, ClubWPT Gold decided to listen and make significant changes.
The rake cap has now been reduced to SC 3 across all HU tables from SC 1/2 and higher. The biggest reduction came for the biggest games, where the cap dropped from SC 10 and SC 30. Rake caps were lowered for full ring as well, dropping from SC 20 to SC 15 for SC 5/10/20 tables.
This is an important step in the right direction for ClubWPT Gold, which boasts a very soft player pool but suffers from many software problems and limitations, such as the lack of multi-tabling possibilities, no note-taking or tagging options, and absence of any special features like run it twice and bomb pots.
Doug Polk Back on Track
With the rake issue resolved, Polk is back to grinding the highest games available, and after initial struggles, he finally seems to be on the right track.
Polk’s graph has been trending in the right direction for the past few days, and at the moment of writing this, he is over $15,000 in the black. While this may not seem that impressive ten days into the challenge, it’s important to mention that it all came after a really rough day that saw Doug lose over $10,000.
There are still 20 days left, and if the upward trend continues, the $100k dream could still be obtained. At this point, Polk will probably need a bit of a heater to help him catch up, but we’ve certainly seen much crazier things happen in poker over the years.
