Full Tilt Update

As happens regularly from time to time, when I went to fire up my full tilt to play some stud hi-lo with bloggers on Tuesday night, I got the message that a new version of the poker client was available on the full tilt servers. I dutifully clicked over and got the update over with, expecting as usual to not even notice the changes but to be able to play. But for the first time in a long time, two changes jumped out at me, both of which I think are very positive overall, one of which, frankly, things I can't believe I never thought about myself, and the other which everyone has thought of but it looks like a major online poker site has finally executed on.

The first cool change in the new ftp update is that all mtt's now have their break at the same time, at 5 minutes before the hour, every hour. This is starkly different from how full tilt has been for years, which is that every mtt has a break every hour, 60 minutes from the end of the last break. The old system made sense, in that you sat down to a tournament, played 60 minutes, and then got a break every 60 minutes to be able to go to the bathroom, grab a snack, hit some Wii baseball home runs, whatever it is you like to do during your online mtt breaks.

But that was also exactly the problem with the old break system -- for anyone who plays more than one mtt at a time, ever, then you don't typically get that 5-minute break period to do all those breaky things. If I sit down and play the Skillz game at 9:30pm ET, the $14 token frenzy or whatever it's called at 9:45pm ET and the 28k at 10pm ET (which Chad won again the other night btw, for only the sixth time though), then that means I get a 5-minute break in the Skillz at 10:30, but I'm still playing through my other two tournaments at that point. At 10:35 the Skillz resumes, and then at 10:45 comes the break for the token frenzy, which ends at 10:50, and then ten minutes later comes the break for the 28k. So that is three 5-minute breaks in the span of 30 minutes, butfor all practical purposes, I have gotten no real break at all, because there was never even one second where I could actually get up and pee like I've had to for a good 30, 40 minutes now.

Well now, with the new change, this will no longer be an issue. Now all mtts will take their break at 5 minutes before the hour. So on Tuesday, for the first time ever, I was able to take a true break while multi-tabling a turbo FTOPS satellite and the Skills event at the same time, at 10:55pm ET. Good stuff, and a good change. Like I said above, I can't believe nobody has thought of that before now.

The other change I noticed as part of the new full tilt update is that they now offer cash no-limit games with antes for the first time. This one is not particularly relevant to my own online poker experience, in that I haven't focused much on cash games for the past year or two, but still it is surely an improvement to have such games available. For the Real Men out there who recognize full ring cash poker as the slow, boring time-passer that is is, the real action junkies who play shorthanded or even heads-up cash just to avoid the incessant folding that can basically guarantee you a very small but fairly easy-to-scratch-out profit, adding antes to the structure is a very welcome turn of events for sho.

I am so into the idea of online nlh cash play with antes that I've been toying with the notion of starting some formal or informal challenge to get myself back into no-limit cash game play after a long time away. As I think I've mentioned previously, somehow, some way, a switch was flipped a couple of months back, and I just stopped being interested in playing the large multi-table tournaments like I had focused on for the previous year and more. It was definitely nothing specific that happened, not some kind of bad mtt run or something, but if anything I think it was probably health-related in that I contracted a cold or flu virus, and for a few weeks solid I was really unable to maintain my focus anywhere near late enough to make even a mediocre run in an mtt. Honestly I bet if I search my stats I won't see a single true mtt played by me in at least two months. No 50-50, no 32k, no 28k, no 35k, no stars 70k, no UB and no bodog multi table tournaments. It's just something I have gotten away from as I do from time to time, and I'm sure I'll be back in mtt land soon enough. But for right now, playing some nlh cash with antes sounds like it could be right up my alley.

Maybe I can convince some of you diggheads to join me and donate to the cause?