TheBowlBoy's Blog

New Laptop.

Had a great month in February and decided it was time for me to get myself a new laptop. I got a Dell for about $1100 CDN at the beginning of March and I have to say I'm pretty happy with it - NOW. When it first was shipped to me I took it outta the box and started getting things set up then I start getting bluescreens!!. WTF!!? Ok so I get a hold of tech support and all they can say is that the installation of windows seems to be corrupt. Yay. So I spend most of the day on the phone reinstalling windows and all the drivers. Fun stuff.

Ok so got that working. Then I installed PT3, which I just purchased as I was using PT2 up until then. Had some issues with that and it definitely took some time getting used to the software but that seems to be working fine now.

Finally I thought I had everything set up with Stars, Pt3 and TableNinja to start doing some serious 24table grinding but about an hour into every session my computer starts locking up, and each time it did, it seemed to have something to do with my sound card.

Needless to say I got mad, because this is a brand new computer and I shouldnt be having any performance issues. I have'nt even had the chance to start surfing any of those shady porn sites yet for crying out loud. I fought really hard with Dell tech support who couldnt figure out the problem and then I got their customer service dept. to agree to send me a new machine. That made me feel a bit better but I was actually just dreading having to set all this stuff up on a new machine yet again... sigh.

So the new machine was being built and scheduled to be shipped out to me very soon ( Dell agreed to allow me to return the first computer a few days after I received the second to give me time to switch stuff over).

Before it got here I solved the problem though!

While having these problems I kept telling myself that Pokerstars, PT3 and Tableninja are fairly cpu intensive but they shouldnt be affecting the soundcard. I would expect a video game to cause problems in this area but Stars is just beeps and stuff right?

Well I was wrong. First I started disabling the sound card altogether. Played a few sessions with no troubles what-so-ever. Ok cool, but now I have to reinstall the sound card everytime I want to do something on the computer that requires sound. Well this is way too annoying. So I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I'm not the dullest either, and I eventually thought of going into Stars' sound settings and turning off the sounds there. TaDa!!! No problems now. I really dont need the sound on for stars anyway, I'm stacking my tables and I actually like it better.

So why the hell would having the sound on in stars cause problems?

Consider all the sounds that are enabled in Stars like action requred, fold, check, bet, raise, chips moving into pot or to winner, dealing of cards... etc. All these .wav files are being processed constantly and I'm seeing somewhere between 12-1500 hands per hour... thats a lot of sounds being played simultaneously which explains the sound card problem.

So if anybody takes anything away from this it should be this. If your computer is lagging like old mule because you're running your poker client, software, and AHK scripts plus whatever other programs might be running then try turning off at least the useless sounds that you dont' need to hear and help things run a little smoother.

As a result of all of this, I really did'nt grind a whole lot. Because I didnt grinded less, I tilted more because I was like OMG I have to make up for lost time now that I got this shit working!

After some soul searching I finally turned things around and am back to owning.

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Hey I've been lurking around here for a bit, and I have to say there is some really good content here and I like the friendly atmosphere. I play 25NL FR on Stars and hope to improve my game, move up, and make some friends.

Not too many people can say that they have a real life poker nick name. I guess it was about 4-5 years ago that I was first introduced to texas hold'em. I met this guy who was having a b-day party for his daughter, and my daughter was invited. We talked a lot about different stuff while all the kids played and became friends. He invited me to a poker game hosted by one of his friends. It was fixed limit, and I had no idea what I was doing but I made $17 profit by hitting some backdoor gut shot straight draws.
A few games later, everybody wanted to switch to NL. I was actually kinda scared. I had read Lee Jones' book and was now trying to beat this home game for a good clip (im very competitive and have always looked for an edge in anything I do). I bought NLHTAP by sklansky and miller and just played really tight at those games and valuebet the snot out of everybody. We would play .25/.50 cash games but the buy in was only $20 which kinda sucked I was able to valuetown people with TPTK, and I'd seriously make like at least $50 everynight.
This one night the host was lazy and we had a big game of like 11 people and rather than mess with all these denominations the host declared that every chip was worth a quarter. I made over $150 that night because I was smacked in the face with the deck on almost every hand that I played, and nobody was folding, and people just kept rebuying. I had so many 25cent chips that I needed something to hold them in because I couldnt stack my chips between hands before I won another big hand. No joke. What do you think I was given to hold them in?
You guessed it! A bowl. A big plastic rubbermaid potato chip bowl, full of white, green, red, blue and black chips, with a the odd ten or twenty dollar bill as I was now the guy to talk to you if you wanted to rebuy. The guy sitting across from me looked at me, sitting down behind my massive bowl of chips, and a smirk on my face and said: "I know what I'm gonna call you... I'm gonna call you TheBowlBoy!"
Needless to say it stuck, and those poker guys call me that to this day and the story still gets retold when newcomers join our games to explain why they call me that.

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