A few more comments on my early PokerView experiences

One thing that PokerView does not have is a good a way to review hands after you complete play and at this point, neither Poker Tracker nor Holdem' Manager can be used with the site. They do have a hand player reviewer that is rather nice but a bit clunky in action. You can click on a hand you want to see that was just played and it might come up that it can't find the database. So, to write up a session, like I've done in the past, means I have to REMEMBER what happened and I've not good at that. Nor do I have a way to know how many hands I've played Ring games or otherwise. They don't have a way to make online notes on any of the players. 

I've been impressed, so far, with PokerView's support and LIVE help. I'm not at all sure they'll be able to keep that up if they ever take off and become the size of ye ole Full Tilt or Poker Stars, but while it last it's great. Last night I was having trouble getting the Lobby to come up (it was taking from 3-6 minutes) and my webcam to function. After talking with the online LIVE chat person, she decided to refer me to her manager. The manager decided she'd like to TeamViewer with me on my computer, and then we chatted live through Skype. The bringing up the Lobby seemed to resolve itself and she discovered the system was trying to come up with a different webcam than the one I was using. Thanks to my ole poker coach I already had TeamViewer and Skype on my computer.

After we finally got my Ring game session going, she ask me questions about how I liked the interface. It appears we may be at the "live" beta stage and they are making continuing changes to the system while we play. I got to offer my opinion about various issues I have (they don't say/print in the chat window what the actual winning hand is, you have to look at the cards it and figure it out for yourself. That would be OK but the hand closes too quickly after the River and the chat window doesn't have a freeze scrolling so you can't keep the results in place to read them). .She said, if I have any future problems to contact her. I ask her how and she said through Skype. I now have the Skype support number. They still have a lot of work to do, including getting a lot more players, as it is hard to find SNG's to play and Ring games below the $0.50/$1.00 level. You can usually find a Tournament but they end up with less than 100 players after an hour's worth of late registration, and are all of the lower dollar buy-in level (from $.01 to $2 that seem to have players when I've been online).

So far I've managed to break even with my initial play. Ring games are not my best play and I have a tendency to overplay hands and not give the other player credit for having the hand that I know will beat me. One my best pots last night was when I was on the other side of that. The other player felt they were beat but had to "look me up" to be sure.

One interesting side point that happened during a ring game last night is another person from Tucson, AZ entered the Ring game webcam session. No one I know, but it was interesting to find that this early in the site's life another Tucsonan was there.

I moved my lamp to in back of my computer desk so I now have light coming directly onto my face and I get a brighter image of myself. Lighting is what many of the players need to work on so we can see them better. I'll post a picture that shows that at the end of this post.

I learned the hard way, that you should take a look in the mirror BEFORE you subject yourself to webcam viewing. Yesterday morning, I got up to do a couple of things intending to head back to bed shortly, so didn't deal with any "out of bed grooming" but got distracted, and on here in a webcam Ring game on PokerView. After playing for a half-hour or more, I was noticing that my hair looked a bit disheveled and eventually went to check it. Well, I'd not combed my hair yet for the day. It could have been a lot worse, but due my lacking much of my hair on my head, there wasn't a lot to make me Einstein-ish looking.

Enough for this morning. Following is the table picture with better lighting for me.

What Now Brown Cow? My Poker update since Poker's Black Friday

Well it came as a sudden shock to the system to find the primary sites I play real money poker on had been closed down by the US DOJ on what appear to be pretty serious charges. I'm not sure some of that may must be the DOJ tossing all the shirt they can find at the fan and seeing how much of it will stick. That's neither here nor there at the moment, as the reality is, none of sites (Full TIlt & Poker Stars in my case) are allowing US players any kind of cash play, even if it's only freerolls, PERIOD!. The money we have there is in some sort of limbo, though this week Poker Stars wants us to cash out our funds NOW. That's a whole big $10.54 for me. No additional word from Full Tilt yet where I have between $275 and $375, depending how they handle the Tournament and Step tickets.

Since April 15th I've been playing on the play money side of these sites, mainly Full Tilt. Wow, how much my game has changed since I started Mark B's classes and weekly group meetings from my Poker Stars play money days. When you're playing play money you don't realize just how much different playing with real money is. I always wanted to win whether it was play money or not. I wasn't one of those All-In every hand play money players; I wanted to play well. Now I clearly see how much different the play is. There are so many hands I won't play now that I did back then and I see the play money players playing now.

Certainly if you are just going to play for fun and never really expect to be involved in cash games, except for maybe some friendly home games, then online play money poker is the way you should go. I still feel there is a place for play money sessions for the more serious poker player, at least for a short time, such as when they are learning about a new form of the game, such as Omaha. It won't teach you how to play real money players, but if you are lucky and get onto a table where the players actually try to play poker, it will help you get an idea of how Omaha hands run, and then when you get back to the real money Omaha tables, you'll have a bit better understanding of the cards flow.

Now, yesterday I decided to the plunge and try a poker site that is still taking US players. I was originally thinking about Carbon Poker (one of the weekly group folks has re-started there). But in a Card Player email they talked about a new site, PokerView that has a webcam options so you can actually see the other players you are playing. I checked it out and decided to give it try. If you're a real serious poker player, this site isn't ready for your prime time yet. It took a bit of juggling things around to get the webcam working and $$$ into the site. It seems to work best with the Firefox browser. They are a small site with only a few hundred to somewhat over a 1000 players at any one time and I think, but don't know for sure, that may also include the play money players. They also have human looking avatars for rooms that don't use the webcam.

Here is a picture of a room with avatars:

 

This is one with the webcam:

That's it for now.