Written by Rebekah Mercer
As you may have heard, Team Online's Adrienne Rowsome is playing a lot of tournaments during the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), and she's taken up the PokerStars challenge to play as many of them as possible on the new PokerStars mobile app. Adrienne, or 'talonchick' as she's known online, has also starred in some entertaining and informative videos to highlight the convenience of playing mobile poker. If you've missed them, you can catch some of them in the links provided below. We also talked to Adrienne to get some pointers from her about playing the WCOOP and some of her impressions of the last few days as she's taken her poker game on the road. But since a picture speaks a thousand words, it stands to reason that a video must speak a million, so let's start there.
Adrienne starts off her challenge with two videos that highlight how she plans and organizes for playing WCOOP. The next one, titled "Talonchick in Bed," shows us what the life of a poker pro is really like (surprisingly it's not all big stacks of money and bottles of champagne) as she rolls out of bed very reluctantly at 3:00 in the morning to play an online event. The pace picks up as Adrienne plays on her iPad with the mobile app while preparing a barbeque and working in the yard. She even manages to dodge a tornado and a wildfire while playing. "How do a wildfire and a tornado fit into this scenario?" you ask. Find the answers to that and more here in Brad Willis' report. And if you're interested in a very thorough and incisive analysis of how to play PLO8, see her latest video.
As you can see from all this, the versatility and convenience of mobile poker makes it exciting and fun. "A big part of the reason poker has appealed to me is because you don't have to sit behind a desk all day like in a conventional job. So the app offers the maximum flexibility." She also enjoys the wow factor that the application delivers. "I know I had some people looking over my shoulder when I had my car in for servicing recently," she remarks. Certainly sounds better than reading three-year-old Field and Stream magazines as I did on a recent visit, wow factor or not.
And as we know, all new technology has challenges, so we asked Adrienne if she had any "wish I had known that" observations about going mobile with PokerStars. She offered up these pointers. "I would recommend that if ladies are wanting to try the mobile app that they consider playing in a deadline turbo satellite or two, just to get the feel of it. I have learned that you should make sure to turn off the feature that auto switches tables too, to avoid potentially disastrous misclicks."
To wrap up, we asked her if she had any special tips for women playing WCOOP. She responded with an unforeseen benefit. "I think women are generally better multitaskers than men, and they are often used to juggling many ideas and tasks at one time, and I am certainly guilty of not always giving online poker my best attention. One of the things that that I've noticed is that when I play on my desktop, sometimes I surf the web, Facebook, and Twitter almost constantly. While on the mobile app, I have physical freedom, but I lose the freedom to web surf, thus making me more attentive to the table and what is going on. My results are certainly much better when I pay attention! Now that I think of it, mobile poker is more similar to live poker in the attention you give it, but faster, less noisy (depending on where you are), less smelly, and you can still play up to four tables at a time." And that last sensory recommendation is where we will leave you. Play poker with the mobile app and avoid those stinky poker rooms!
WCOOP closes out this weekend with the Main Event on Sunday. There's still time to take advantage of Adrienne's advice and qualify and play one of the biggest events in poker. The WCOOP web site will give you all the details. And for more videos from Adrienne and other PokerStars pros, see our website here.