The FT Update Blues

I have been completely non-productive as far as poker is concerned, for a week or so.  When Full Tilt pushed out their update, I found out just how dependent on 3rd party programs I am :P.  While it didn't take all that long to find an acceptable table mod, it did take me a bit to figure out how to apply it.  And I was playing with a pretty crappy deck for a bit, when I was playing.  By now, I actually think I have a better looking setup than before (I'll try to remember to screen shot it).

But for several days, I was back to only using the tools that the poker client provides in order to play, and I sucked at that!  I thought it would be inconvenient to play without my AHK scripts, but it was more than that.  Even playing 3-4 tables, I was timing out all over the place for a bit.  When I stopped timing out, I was still paying so much attention to the time bank that I missed some pretty big details about the hands, and also kind of went on auto-pilot.  I had a lesson with Jared last Friday that was pretty laughable in terms of what I was missing.

Add to that, I had not been able to pull myself away from some of the trainwreck threads in the Zoo, plus refreshing every 30 minutes in the software forum to read about the latest updates.  So, I didn't play at all until yesterday, and even that was just on 2 tables of 50NL to test out the first betas of Poker Shortcuts and SpadeEye-post update.  Poker Shortcuts worked some, but it was doing all kinds of crazy stuff with calculating bets and what-not.   The good news is that I made over 2 BI in like 150 hands :).  Way to run hot when playing lower.

Tonight, I will disable some of the functions in Poker Shortcuts, but it still has the ability to click on the time bank and let me fold with the keyboard, both of which will put me back in my comfort zone.  Seat selection may be a bit of a different story.  SpadeEye went a lot slower.  It also reported finding a lot less players than I'm used to.  Finally, table scoring doesn't work yet.  I'd devised a pretty intricate table scoring system that I think worked better than just looking at average VPIP or # of buddies, or whatever.  Still, it's better than what I had right after the update, and I'm looking forward to getting back into playing.

I think I'll also re-watch my last lesson and Josh's reviews before playing a ton more.  Hopefully between finding some sort of software equilibrium and doing some more in-depth thinking, I'll quickly get back to where I was mentally just before the update.