Headphones – A must or an accessory?

We all know guys like Phil Ivey and Phil Hellmuth are famous for rocking headphones, but today at the No-Limit Hold'em Short-Handed event, I was surprised to see guys like Erik Seidel tuning the table out. If, as almost all pros will claim, poker is a people game where reading your opponent is just as important as the cards in your hand, then where do headphones, iPods and music feature in that?

It's impossible for me to believe that in the game of high stakes Hold'em that these pros are playing, something as noticeable and prominent as an iPod next to their chips is as innocent as it appears to be. As far as I can tell, there are a few different ways to examine the headphone sensation in poker.

The first is that they present you as a competitor and character who takes the game a little less seriously. You come across as casual and removed from the action on the table. To your opponents, you're basically in your own world and doing your own thing - out of the action until you decide to be a part of it.

The tunes can also serve as soothing motivation to a player. If he's taken a bad beat, he can cool out to some chilled music in order to take the stress level down a notch and avoid going on tilt. Often when players lose a big hand they get frustrated, and listening to their opponents dumb chit-chat, or the ever present sound of raining chips that echoes through the gigantic poker room, can get really irritating. Headphones can drown all those sounds out, letting a player zone out, sit back, and wait for the right moment to act instead of making an irrational play at the wrong time.

All of these reasons give headphones a favourable nod, but there's one large factor that could be used to argue against them. That, of course, is that you may miss out on something telling that your opponent says, and thus lose out on getting some valuable knowledge that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

One final note on headphones at the table is that, if the day comes when every single player at the table is listening to an iPod, the game of poker will have surely lost something. Live games are social meetings, and human interaction is what makes them so fun, unique and relevant. Without this social aspect, you might as well be staring at a screen.