Online poker is a beautiful game. You can sit in your living room and win or lose lots of money in a single evening. It’s all the fun of poker in a casino or with friends without the annoyance of having to taste fresh air at any point in time. Also, you can play in your underwear. Generally, casinos frown upon such behavior unless you’re Gabe Kaplan.

In addition to being able to spend hours in your underwear, you can also do whatever else you want. You can watch television, movies, surf the web, do homework, take pictures of hands and listen to music as loud as you want. While I may just be stating the obvious, this is all very important stuff.

Let’s face it, poker takes time. In the casino, you’re relegated to your mp3 player, reruns of SportsCenter and the jerk wanting everyone to believe he’s a pro despite the fact that he’s currently sitting at a $1-$2 limit hold’em table. (I’ll get into that in the future. You can believe that.) This is why keeping yourself properly entertained is so important.

If you want to make any money playing cards online, you’ve got to pay attention to the game, but also not let yourself get bored. Whether you’re sitting down to play cash or tournament style poker, you’re going to see a ton of hands. I’m not sure how many hands the average online player sees in an hour, but its way more than you should be playing. (I’ll get the CP research department on that.)

Because you’re seeing so many hands, you have to keep yourself entertained. In a casino, you can play one game at a time. At home, you can play as many as you can fit on your screen. In a perfect world, you would pick one game and concentrate on that, but in reality, you’d get bored.

Generally, I like to play tournaments. That means I’m in survival mode and I can’t see a flop every time, no matter how pretty that 6,9 suited looks. Whenever I’m playing, I have to have two games going. A great way to keep yourself from getting bored is to pick your main game and then enter into a small stakes Sit & Go or cash game. This way, I get to keep playing and I don’t start to get the itch to call a 3x raise in middle position because I’m holding a Queen. (But I could hit trips!)

In addition to keeping my screen blinking with multiple games, I make it a point to have the television on. Sports are great. Lots of commercials and stops in action. You don’t have to watch the entire time because the announcers will let you know when something important happened.

I wouldn’t recommend watching serialized dramas while playing cards if you’ve never seen the episode before. If you’re watching Dexter or LOST, you can’t be turning away to contemplate what to do with middle pair on the turn for a quarter of your chip stack. You’ll miss critical plot points! While you’re check raising with your pocket 3’s, they’re revealing the actual location of the island!

So keep all these things in mind the next time you sit down to play. When you’re playing online poker, you want to be distracted enough to not get bored and play recklessly, but not so distracted that you’re getting your blinds stolen for hours at a time. And for God’s sake, put on some pants.