When I decided to move up to 25NL, I also decided to try to move over to Full Tilt Poker to take advantage of rakeback and their $600 first-time deposit bonus. I did not like what I found at all.
My first experience with Full Tilt was absolutely horrible. I was incredibly used to the PokerStars software, and found Full Tilt’s client program to be slow and lacking in many features. Aside from the basic software itself, I was not used to the look and layout of Full Tilt. I found myself confused and making stupid mistakes, like not spotting players in the hand because I didn’t realize their 2 little cards were still active. PokerStars shows live cards on the table, Full Tilt shows the cards above the player’s name. I kept looking around the empty table and thinking I was heads-up with someone when there was really a 3rd or 4th player still in the hand. I also kept confusing who was on the button because the two sites place the button slightly differently in relation to the player avatars. In the end, I ended up losing slightly over $100 in slightly over an hour. I was not a happy camper.
Incredibly angry over the loss and disappointment with their software, I immediately went back to PokerStars (and kept right on losing). The amount of money I’d lost, and how quickly I lost it, really set me off. As I mentioned in my last post here, that’s where I started changing things in my game. I lost somewhere around another $100 in the $25 games on PokerStars.
After a couple weeks of convincing myself that I do indeed know how to play poker, I’m giving 25NL at Full Tilt another shot. The first few sessions have been promising. I can’t yet handle the 8 tables I normally play on PokerStars, but I seem to be doing well with 5 tables running. I’ve come out a winner the first few sessions, and got the first $20 of my $600 bonus. I’m also earning rakeback which should end up padding my earnings by something like $400 per month.
I’m getting more and more accustomed to the Full Tilt software now and not having nearly as much trouble figuring out what’s going on at multiple tables. It’s taken a couple days, but I’ve figured out how to use their software a bit better and get myself up and running quicker in the games I want to be in.
I do still, however, feel that their software is terrible. With multiple tables open, it starts to slow down my computer much more than the PokerStars client. (I have a dual core Pentium D system with graphics card and a ton of RAM, I’m not trying to run it on some outdated junker.) The sorting options in the lobby (at least for cash games) are just a hair above useless. PokerStars allows you to use multiple criteria for sorting table lists. I can get into the games I want without thinking about it. Full Tilt doesn’t even let me filter out stakes I don’t want to play. So I have to find my stakes, watch out for pot-limit or no-limit, then I can only sort by 1 of the listed criteria, and everything else I have to manually scroll up and down and find the tables I want. I’m getting better at doing it, but it drives me nuts. It’s such an incredible waste of time and effort when all I want to do is play cards.
As far as poker itself, I’m still sticking to my little hand chart, and so far it’s working great. I’m also concentrating very hard on keeping myself in the right state of mind, and avoiding emotional play. My wife even said that she finds it a little disturbing that I’m showing so little emotion as I play now. She says she doesn’t like it that she can’t tell if I’m winning or losing because I’ve always got the same calm look on my face. She says I’ve become “Poker Buddha”. I think that’s a pretty good thing. I’m not feeling nervous, or scared, or outnumbered, or outsmarted, or any of the other things I was feeling when I took my first shot at the $25 games. Things are going well so far, and I’m feeling pretty confident. I think I’m going to stick with both Full Tilt, and the $25 cash games.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do once I’ve cleared the full $600 bonus. I may just go back to PokerStars and try to get higher VIP and bonus levels with them. I suppose it all depends on how accustomed I get to the rakeback…
May the fish be with you…
October 12th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Hi,
Stick with Full Tilt. It is frustrating at first but you get used to it. The colour coding feature is really useful. Also you can create nice filters that only show normal speed, NL tables if you want (I hate PL!).
The only thing I notice is that at Full Tilt there seem to be a few more aggro types than at PokerStars but still plenty of very bad players.
If its not out of line – I have no idea how good you are but I would strongly consider playing just 4 tables max, even 3. At 6/8 tables you are going to improve more slowly and will be missing a ton of spots to pick up pots. With 3 or 4 tables you still get plenty of action and might even find your win rate going up. Once you have a game that is almost ‘automatic’ you could add some tables.
GL