The first time I ever played online poker it was over a dialup connection on a 486 computer, back when processors were still named with numbers instead of words(interesting fact: this changed because one of the few things that cannot be trademarked in our country is numbers). The whole thing was as stable as a one-legged man trying to walk a tightrope in a suit of armor. If it wasn’t ruined by my computer crashing or the connection dropping it was the online site itself falling off the map for a few hours. I felt like this kid. To this day just the thought of the AOL voice “goodbye” curls my toes and makes my blood boil, abject horror.

Well we’ve come a long way baby. I now play on nothing less than my dream setup.

My crown jewel is the twin 24” LCD monitors. No longer do I have to cram 8 tables on my Macbook Air’s tiny screen! These bad boys were courtesy of none other than Full Tilt Poker. They can arrive on your doorstep in less than a week as soon as you can scrounge up 162,000 Full Tilt Points, a couple of months of playing if you stop sleeping or going outside.

The machine is a high performance gaming computer, Aurora: Torchbearer Edition made by Alienware. I won’t bore you with the specs but know that it is fast enough that the idea of “processor speed” never even crosses my mind while using it. As in I don’t sit there while something is loading thinking “@#%*&$@ slow-ass processor speed.” You just tell the computer to do something and it’s done.

The desk is quite a novelty in itself. It is a Sit-Stand desk by a company called Relax the Back. Inside the legs is a lift that raises or lowers the desk controlled by an up/down switch on the underside. I use it to go from low-rider mode where I can slide the recliner over and truly get comfortable up to a more standard height for the office chair. The little black thing in front of the chair is varying tilt footrest, remarkably comfortable.

If anything needed an upgrade it would be the keyboard, the mouse however wouldn’t go anywhere. For anyone that’s going to click a mouse millions of times like myself; I recommend this guy. The Logitech MX Revolution is the most comfortable mouse I have ever used. They must do great business with poker players as the friend of mine who recommended it has personally went through nine of them over the years. The mouse isn’t faulty, quite durable actually; it’s just that he smashed the first eight throwing them against the wall. Proof of the durability can be seen in that it took dozens of fastballs in various directions around his office to actually put those eight out of commission.

I remember seeing pictures of the sick setups pros on twoplustwo had back in the day and it motivated me to want to win enough money to buy something better than the crashbox piece of garbage computer I had. Hopefully my little corner will do the same for someone else.

I’ll leave you with one last picture. Unlike my normal afternoon view consisting of two gigantic monitors, a TV to match, a poster of Tyler Durden and perch above Wash Ave this is what my eyes were affixed to this past week in Cancun. As I anticipate loading up some online tables as soon as I finish this sentence, my sunburn is starting to peel.