A new monitor

One of the problems I've been having with poker is that I'm doing it on a shoestring.  I haven't had some things that would help me a lot.  I started with a $50 deposit to America's Cardroom (which is very inferior to the site on which I played post-Black Friday.)  Since I should have a minimum of 100 buy-ins to play MTTs, and most of them have an entry fee of at least $5.50, that's a big problem.  I know that I should just play poker and not worry about the size of my bankroll, but it's hard not to factor it in when I'm making decisions about how much risk to take in a tournament, or which one I should enter.  I'm careful and tentative, and as much as I try to fight against that, I guess it's natural in my situation.  More about that in the near future.

I also don't have a lot of the tools that winning players use.  I can't subscribe to a poker coaching site or to poker magazines.  I don't have a real office chair--the chair that I'm sitting on has wood slats on the back.  I don't buy poker books, even though I know that in any field it's important to keep up with the literature.  At all levels, the games play a lot differently than they did 10 years ago.

My wife gets me a poker book for special occasions like my birthday or Christmas, and I don't want more than that when the money is coming out of family funds.  Finally, until a few days ago, I was using a monitor that wasn't helping me at all.

The monitor flickered a lot.  It needed a new screen (which I was against paying for because one can almost buy a new monitor on sale for the cost of a screen).  The way that the glare from incandescent light acted on the monitor was so disconcerting that sometimes I would sit in total darkness, and have a flashlight in case I needed to type or read something on paper.

I don't feel right using family funds to fix these problems when I'm not making any money.  My wife finally insisted that we get a new monitor, and I found a good price online.  Now I can see the tables in any light or no light, there is no flickering, and I can actually read the names of the players when I have two tables on the screen.

It will make a big difference, and I hope, help me to finally get this enterprise on the right track.