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Poker-Choose your Tools With Care.

Poker-Choose your Tools With Care.

A poker article by Peter Birks at BETDIRECT POKER for Easy Play Games

If you intend to play online poker seriously, one matter to which you should give a lot of consideration is your poker-playing environment. An interesting poker blog consists of David Ross's account of trying to make a living for a year playing online. It was written some time ago, ending in March 2004, but is an excellent account of the severe ups and downs of a serious online poker player's life. David started off playing two tables simultaneously, but by the end of the year had built up to four.

The interesting point here is that David Ross, playing professionally for a year, only had one monitor. He talked about screens "popping up" and of nearly making the mistake of clicking on "fold" or "raise" on the wrong table.

If you plan to play on more than one table at a time, then you have to consider getting either one large monitor (19 in, 1600x1200) or (preferably) two large monitors. This means that you can keep your eye on all the games that you are playing, without waiting for them to pop up when it is your turn.

Even if you are only playing at one table, a couple of monitors is useful. If you are in a tournament, you can look at the "state of the tournament" page at the same time as you are playing. Knowing the average stack, the number of players left in the tournament, and the size of the shortest and largest stacks are all useful pieces of information.

If you are using another document to keep notes on players (or proprietary software such as Pokertracker) multiple monitors enable you to keep this information in plain sight at all times. Once again, a useful edge. And remember, if you aren't doing this, someone else is.

Setting up a double monitor requires the installation of a special graphics cards that supports two monitors (although many laptops and some desktops now come with this extra monitor facility as standard). Windows ME and onwards automatically recognizes when you connect the second monitor and enables you to set up the monitors as you wish through Start/Settings/Control Panel/Display. Monitors are now two a penny, with even flat-screen monitors coming in at under ?200 for 1280 x 1024. If you are a complete technophobe and you need to install an additional card for your second monitor, your local computer shop will probably do the whole lot for ?250.

If you are buying a new machine from, say, Dell, things are even easier. You can specify a double-monitor set-up from the word Go.

The cooler looking and more space-efficient system is a single top-of-the-range 19-inch flat monitor. But these are expensive (still ?500 or so). However, they do allow you to put four tables on a single screen, and they run off a standard graphics card, so it is not necessary to open up the back of your existing machine if you do not have dual monitor capability.

There are two other parts of your poker-playing environment that you should consider - the table and the chair. Are you currently sitting on a dining-room chair at an MDF "workstation" that doesn't even allow you to rest your elbows? Well, don't try playing a six-hour mega-tournament if you are. For the serious player a decent office chair (arms, lean-back) and a proper office table are money well-spent. Okay, not everyone has the space for this, but the longer you plan to play, the higher the priority you should allocate to your seating arrangements. Poor seating leads to poor concentration, which leads to lost money.

A Swedish kid recently posted an interesting update on an old poker aphorism. It ran roughly along the lines of "If you sit down in a game and you don't know within half an hour who the fish is, then you have been spending too much time surfing the web". Yes, I admit it, I am guilty of this too, and it is one of the drawbacks of multiple monitors! If you are just playing in a single game, it's too easy to look away from the table when you have folded and to read an interesting post on a poker forum (like, er, this one). This really is a terrible mistake to make; you should be paying attention to the game! But I suspect that all players who "put in the hours" are guilty of it.

Some people play at more than one table because, like those middle-aged women with 12 books at the bingo hall, they find one table too boring. Other people play at more than one table because they are there to make money, and more tables means more money. The single-table player can make use of this. If you see someone is a "multi-tabler" and you know that player is reasonably competent, then you can be fairly sure that at $2-$4 and $3-$6 their play is more likely to be "straight up-and-down" ABC poker. Subtlety and "plays" are not part of the multi-tabler's vocabulary. They do not need to be. These players do not need to create situations - they wait for the situations to come to them.

This does not mean that they will never bluff, or that they will never make marginal plays. What it does mean is that they will not try anything unusual. Multi-tablers tend to play by their own strict rules, and they stick to those rules.

Once in a while you will come across the lunatic multi-tabler. It's unusual because, unless they are very rich, these players do not last long. And, rather than get a reasonable amount of action from two or three tables, the lunatic tends to create action at a single table. But for the lunatic on speed, even this is not enough, and you get the multi-table madman. With these players you desperately want to be sitting on their left, so that, when you get calling hands you can fold to their raise, and when you get raising hands you can reraise. Because these guys are creating mayhem at more than one table, there is little point in subtlety. Don't say to yourself "now what would he make of this?..." since he probably isn't even watching. What you want is to get away from marginals and to maximize your profit from the winners. It's oh-so-tempting to reraise these loose players with marginal hands, because you know darned well that you might be winning. Be warned. This is the way to the poorhouse. One reason that this type of player does not go broke as quickly as you think he should is that other players loosen their own hand standards, sometimes calling down with a ropey pair. Keep to your principles, but try to isolate.

You won't come up against players like this too often, but when you do, you want to be patient and, when you get a decent hand, brutal.