Yet another of the great advantages of playing online tournament poker is the lack of distractions. Unless your Internet connection is in a room full of monkeys, or someone has left a leaf blower operating outside of your window while they're on coffee break, you should be able to generally manage the level of distraction while you play. Most poker rooms give you the option of turning on player chat in order to engage in some virtual smack talk, or give you the opportunity for witty, sophisticated dialog like "nh" and "ty!" and the like. Other poker rooms, unfortunately, make the chat window a permanent feature of the table, leaving you open to the annoying criticisms of those you suck out on. Now what do you do?
You could try to out-psycho the other player, but hopefully you'll choose a more benign approach, which will not only be better for your heart, but also keeps you from getting banned. While not always advertised, most of those poker rooms that force you to keep open a chat window will allow you to block specific players from the chat. It would rock if that meant that you block them completely out of the chat room (I HAVE THE POWER!), but you are simply blocking their text from appearing in your chat window. This is recommended for those chatty Cathy's that keep the text scrolling, distracting you from the game at hand. So if you are subjected to the obnoxious or those afflicted with diarrhea of the mouth, click on their player icon or in the chat room window options, and block that player.
This also gives you the opportunity to type in a stinging zinger and block them right after you hit enter, for a deliciously satisfying last-word moment. Not that I've ever done that, or anything.
