Tiltbusting, Headphones, Shortstackers

Posted by icemonkey9 on Jan 26, 2010 in General | 3 comments

Busting Tilt

I found a great way to get off any sort of tilt you might be facing, be it from poker or life.  What you do is take your 3-year-old nephew to Disneyland and have a ball and be a kid.  Seriously, who can be pissed about a bad session when you pose for a picture with Donald Duck?

Certainly not me!  I actually got my ticket to Disneyland for free because they have a volunteer thing going on.  I gave blood at a local hospital and I got my ticket, which I applied to get an annual pass which came out to about $100 for the year which seemed like a no brainer.  FYI, I live about 15 minutes away from Disneyland, so it's not like it's something I'd just do twice a year.  Obviously, my wife was thrilled at the prospect of visiting Disneyland once or twice a month and has her pass all ready to go.  Tilt - BUSTED!

Sennheiser HD 555 Headphones Arrive

I am not sure if any of you care about what headphones I use, but I imagine that there's a lot of online poker players that use headphones while playing.  This way we can listen to whatever music we like and our bleeps & chings at the poker tables without annoying anyone else in the house/condo/apartment/cave.  I had a pair of okay headphones with the Skullcandy Hesh, but they didn't fit my head too well and would get very uncomfortable on my ears after an hour.

Enter the Sennheiser HD 555s, an amazing set of headphones which fit amazingly on your head.  The comfort level is through the roof with these things!  They are extremely comfortable and totally enclose your ears without hitting them.  It's an open design so your head won't sweat either, with the trade-off being that people next to you will faintly hear whatever you are listening to.

In terms of audio quality, they aren't the "OMG SO AMAZING" headphones I thought they would be.  There is very little bass tone to these guys.  What happened though is that I played around with the equalizer settings in iTunes and found one that made them sound awesome.  I'm hearing elements and instruments in songs I never did before, which in my opinion, is a huge complment.  When I add together the increase factor of the comfort (huge) plus increased quality of sound (minor) over my old headphones, I think the purchase (sub $100!!!) was well worth it.

Killing the Shorties

My hate of shortstackers is well documented in the 2 year history of this blog.  After playing my 20k hands at 25nl I can understand now why I see some people on TwoPlusTwo say "who cares, shortstackers suck!" because at 25nl and 50nl they are really horrible and don't know what they are doing.

The problem is when you get to the small and mid stakes games.  At 100nl you'll definitely find some decent shorties that know what they are doing and I found more than a handful of great ones at 200nl.  I've never played above that level but many mid and high stakes players document all the time how the shorties are the single biggest problem in online poker today.

Now, the war is won at Full Tilt Poker ... and hopefully PokerStars will follow suit soon.  The rumors are out there that its coming up in their meetings and they have heard a ton of feedback already.  If you feel strongly about the issue, I highly suggest PM'ing "Scottyy" or "PS SteveD" on TwoPlusTwo because those comments DO go a long way.