Back from vacation

I'm back from a weeklong vacation to Canada.

I didn't take a complete break from poker though. I managed to put in a few hours of $3/$6 limit ring games on an oldish PC with a smaller (than I am used to) 18" LCD monitor without Poker Tracker and GameTime+.

The max resolution of 1280x1024 made it harder to multitable - so I mostly stuck to 3 tabling instead of 4 tabling. By far the biggest handicap was playing without Poker Tracker/GameTime+. I'm pretty sure this cost in excess of 1BB/hour when 3 tabling. It did force me to try and pay closer attention to the habits of my opponents, so in some respects the games were more interesting than usual.

This makes me think back to how long I had been playing ring games without Poker Tracker/GameTime+ even after I had read rave reviews from places like the forums at 2+2. More recently, I've been hearing online pros sing the praises of PokerAce HUD. I've been too lazy to download and install this. However, this past week of playing without Poker Tracker at all has reminded me that I should be keeping pace with the tools that online pros are using.

Sometimes reminders come in unexpected ways.