Enter Tank

liquid's YTD: $830.95

My laptop arrived Wednesday: a Dell Inspiron 6000. I have gone to the dark side.

I had four laptop-shopping criteria:

1. Cheap.


2. High screen resolution.


3. Good battery life.


4. Small.

I ended up choosing the best screen resolution I could find (1920 x 1200!!) for the lowest price I could find ($799). Battery life is adequate at between 2.5 and 3 hours. As for criterion #4? Well, three out of four isn't bad. This thing is a tank. Ergo, I have named it "Tank."

So I spent Wednesday evening setting up Tank, researching bonus codes for Party Poker, transferring funds, checking out Poker Tracker for Omaha, and not playing any actual poker at all. Yesterday I tried my first few sessions on Party. I decided to start at the $25 PLO tables, an option I never had on PokerRoom. About ten minutes in, I flopped a bare set of aces, called a pot-sized bet from early position, and got another caller behind me. The turn brought a blank and another pot-sized bet from early position. I went ahead and re-raised all-in.... and both players called: early position with top and bottom pair, and late position with third set. A sign of things to come? Sweet mother I hope so.

A few technical notes:

1. The 1920 x 1200 resolution on Tank is perfect. Plenty of room for multiple tables, stats windows, whatever.


2. The Party interface is clunkier than I expected. Particularly disappointing is the lack of keyboard shortcuts. I found this workaround, which is so-so. Also, as far as I can tell there's no way to check your hole cards after you've folded them, other than to wait for the hand to complete and then check the history.