2007-10-20-19-02-56
Poker Tips
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My "Ikea Hack" desk. After looking at it, I can see that it was unconsciously inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. Since it is the most incredible house I’ve ever seen, I’m quite ok with the resemblance. All it needs is rock, trees, and a stairway into a river.

Black uprights are 1/4" thick steel speaker stands that were custom built for me a few years ago by a robotics engineer Honda co-worker as a barter for a case of poker chips.

The thin horizontal board is the backing from an old Ikea bookshelf given to me a few years ago by a friend and Columbia University schoolmate when he moved from Los Angeles to North Carolina. It is screwed to the top plate of each speaker stand from below by three drywall screws.

The main desk surface is from an Ikea coffee table. It is 68"x31". This is wide enough for my monitor and a laptop, and deep enough to push the keyboard back and eat on it while watching movies or what not. It is typically "cost effective" hollow core Ikea construction of particle board frame and corrugated cardboard in between a wood veneer top surface and a cardboard bottom. This construction makes it very difficult to attach to anything since screws will only hold in the 2" particle board frame. Because of this, there are only two 3" drywall screws holding the table top to the board.

The computer and external hard drive platform is an L-shaped lower shelf from an Ikea computer desk that at 20"x26" was waaay too small to be useful. The L shape workes well to allow the shelf to wrap around the vertical upright. Using a 1/2" drill bit, I made three holes at the three corners of the shelf and used cut drumsticks (the drumming kind, not from chickens) as legs to keep the computer off the dusty lint-producing carpet, and give room for the many, many cables to go.

Obviously this seems like an unstable creation, but I came up with a solution. There is a 6"x9" L-bracket screwed into a stud in the wall as an anchor. The bracket is screwed into both the horizontal board, and the tabletop, keeping the whole structure from tipping, tilting, moving, or falling over. It also keeps the gap to the wall at exactly 1/2" to give room for wires to drape down.

This Texas Hold Em Poker tip can be boiled right down to this. What is the objective of poker? What is YOUR objective when playing poker? Is it to make money? Is it to win the most pots? Well, if winning the most money and pots was your objective then you should play every single pot, raise big at every go. You would most likely win the most pots but that’s not beating the game. What about enjoying yourself? Is that the objective of poker. Yes, for some people, but that’s not beating the game, that’s enjoying the game. You can do both.

At the end of the day, poker is all about making the correct decisions. Understanding that making correct decisions is  the critical point this Texas Hold Em Poker tip is trying to convey. Take just that home and you’ve done well for today. If you make all the correct decisions you will succeed. You you make poor decisions you will likely fail very quickly.

Playing poker is kind of like investing. You get your money, gather and learn as much information as possible, make a decisions on investing you money and hope you get a good return. If you do or you don’t, that goes back into the information pool, you change or alter you decision and invest again, trying to get a good return. This is investing. Funnily enough this is exactly what poker is. You get your money, in the form of chips. Gather information on the other  players and the cards you have (odds etc.), make a decision when to investing and how much and hope for a good return. Depending on what happens alters how you will do it next time, and the cycle goes on. The thing is, in poker, you get results within minutes instead of having to wait years. You can chop, change and fine tune much faster then you can with normal investing.

Making all the correct decisions is what investing, or poker, is all about. The mental challenge of competition, the financial risk and the possibility for reward all lure people into playing poker. But really what it boils down to is making decisions. If you make the correct decisions you will succeed. If you make less the perfect decisions you will learn very fast. After reading this Texas Hold Em Poker tip you should realise that every decision you make is vital to your poker game, and if you are making the wrong ones you need to fix this and make the correct ones.

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