My current poker set up, where I play and for what stakes

I am now playing 50nl on Fulltilt, where I deposited $510 at the end of October 2008, having just moved up from 25nl, and 8 weeks later, with a bankroll of $1400. All of this money comes from an initial freeroll win from Pitbull of $15 (see post below) so lets see how far that goes….

I use a 22inch wide-screen monitor, windows XP SP3 (just so much faster than Vista, which I have on a separate partition within a dual boot environment), Poker Office running as my tracking and HUD assistant. I multi-table usually around the 8 table mark, putting in usually 800 hands over a 2 hour session, which I try to do daily, giving me the 20k target of hands per month. 20k of hands is the minimum amount of hands I believe you need for a feel for your real ptbb/100 win rate beyond variance (where ptbb/100 is the “standard” measure of win rate, being poker tracker big bets won per 100 hands). You only really know how good you are over 100k of hands I think, but who wants to spend 100k of hands at 10nl if they are winning consistently?

I have money on Pokerstars , but at present am trying to work off the deposit bonus before end of February on Fulltilt. I also have a rakeback deal where I get 27% back. Pokerstars do not run rakeback, but the idea is to get to 100nl then move back there and aim for Supernova, which is part of a reward points scheme unique to Pokerstars and where a good range of bonuses lie. Pokerstars is also the best software to play on by a mile. Regarding how weak / strong the opposition is, I don’t subscribe to the idea that the quality of opposition varies that much between the various sites. Not beyond 25nl anyway. Choice of tables and software are where the primary win rate benefits are in my own view.

I prefer to play as deep stacked as possible, and Fulltilt has 200bb deep tables which is great. Pokerstars at present does not have this above 5nl. I am one of those who loathes the small stacker minimum buy in player. At 600nl I can understand it a bit more, but at micro and small stakes, these type of morons will never ever learn how to play post flop poker and will never develop at poker. I cannot understand what they are thinking. PLO is a different matter, which I may discuss later, but for hold’em, if you don’t have the bankroll, PLAY TOURNIES. Otherwise you’ll be a loser forever.

If I am travelling, I use a Sony G11 laptop (again dual boot with both Vista and XP) with a 12 inch screen (portability is the most important). This limits me to 4-6 multi-tabling.