Drinking from the firehose
Apparently I don’t get enough online poker.
A while ago I purchased an uber video card for my computer at home with two monitor jacks, so my desktop is super wide, and I can scroll the mouse across both of them like it was one big Nam Jun Paik video installation.
I did this because I wanted to play a video game and be able to do something else simultaneously. But I disconnected the second monitor after it proved incompatible with the game. Screw that, I thought.
Now I’ve reconnected it. I did this because I wanted to try “multi-tabling”, playing more than one online poker game at once with two monitors. I tried it once on a single monitor, but I found that the windows overlapped each other.
On Party Poker whenever it’s your turn the window for that game is brought immediately to the foreground. If you’re playing two tables this starts to happen a lot until you start to feel like an epileptic. So I took one of the spare LCD monitors I had laying around and hooked it up.
Yes, I have spare LCD monitors laying around my office. It’s like the crypt keeper’s lair Wizard’s laboratory in there. I’ve got enough hardware to build another computer if I felt like it.
So this morning I got up early and while my dog watched me lay on the floor behind the CPU I hooked up the other monitor and fired up two simultaneous $2/$4 games at PartyPoker.com.
The two monitors improved the problem of screen switching that was so distracting. I also found that instead of studying each player and creating a mental profile of them, I was basically just playing: 1) my cards, 2) my position in the betting order, and 3) my read on how they had bet their hands before the flop.
This isn’t a bad thing for $2/$4 poker, a game which I’m probably a favorite in. But it’s not going to do much to develop my player profiling skills, which are crucial for playing higher levels.
So I’ll try it for a while. The one positive thing I noticed was that unlike when I’m playing a single table, I can never get very attached to a marginal hand, since there’s no percentage in hanging onto a marginal hand when a good one will come along soon anyway.
Mmmmm that’s good for the bottom line. Good…