You spent a hard long day at work, fought rush-hour traffic the whole way home, and now that you’re finally in the sanctity of your living room you just want to relax and have a good time.

You crack open a beer but can’t seem to decide what you’d rather do: rock the plastic guitar or get your grind on with some online poker.

Finally, you won’t have to make this choice. In just a few relatively simple steps you can set up your Rock Band guitar as your very own wireless poker controller.

Here’s how you can get it done.

Step 1

Plug the guitar receiver into your computer. Your computer should automatically install the guitar, and it will even show up as a game controller (you can find a link to see those in your control panel).

You might have to hit the sync buttons. Also a good idea: make sure the guitar is turned on.

Step 2

You now have your guitar working as a game controller. Basically, this means the guitar will send commands to your computer.

You need your computer to translate these commands into keystrokes and then make those keystrokes execute specific commands in your poker software.

First, download and install this program:

http://www.windyhilltech.com/poker/ps/config.php#download

This program lets you to control your Full Tilt or PokerStars game windows using only your keyboard. You then need to set up a unique keyboard key (F keys recommended) for each poker command you want to use.

In total there are six commands which are important: Click Left Button, Click Middle Button, Click Right Button, Bet Pot, Bet All-In (or Max) and Time.

That’s it; you’ve just set up your commands for poker. Move on to step 3

Step 3

Now that you have your poker commands controlled by the keyboard, you need to bind the guitar buttons to the specific keyboard functions used.

You can use any program that lets you bind game controllers to keyboard keys, but we used Xpadder. You can get it here: http://xpadder.com/

Once you have Xpadder, you need to set it up. Follow the onscreen instructions initially until you get to the tabbed setup screen.

There you want to click on the buttons tab. Press the neck buttons on the guitar one at a time. Each time you press a button it should show up as a box in the pink screen.

Make sure to click and drag the boxes into the order you see them in on the guitar (buttons 1 and 4 will be swapped unless you manually move them).

You should have five squares on the screen. Now tilt the guitar up until a sixth square shows up. Drag that square up above the five squares.

Click on the DPad tab. Set up to the strummer strummed up, set right to the whammy bar and set down to the strummer going down. You don’t need to set left to anything at all.

Now click on finish and close. You should see six boxes and one big DPad plus sign on the screen. You want to click on each box and bind it to key you used in step 2.

Highly recommended: Setting the all-In bet to the Star Power position. Nothing is more awesome than moving all-in by doing a rock-star jumping windmill final note.

Now you’re set. Make sure you have Xpadder and Poker Shortcuts running, open your Full Tilt or PokerStars client and log on to a table.

For the software to work properly you need to have the poker table active, and the mouse hovering over top of the table but not over the chat box.

Now throw the strap over your head and power chord your way to poker glory.