Live Poker vs. Online Poker
January 21st, 2008
There are plenty of advantages to playing poker online. The first is location. You don’t have to travel anywhere and play where ever you are. That could be in the office in Stockholm or at home in New York or in a hotel somewhere in London or at an internet café in Prague. You also don’t have to fight traffic or find parking when you get to your local casino. You also don’t have to stand around and wait for several hours until a seat opens up at a table, like you have to do on weekends at most popular poker rooms.
A lot of people prefer playing online because of the multi-tabling options. You can play one or as many as a dozen tables at once (some brave souls play up to twenty at a time, but they might not be human). Playing in the comforts of your own home allows you to watch TV in the background, or cook dinner in between hands, or do some work during the downtime. And if you have wifi running throughout your home, you have the added advantage of still playing while going to the bathroom. And probably my favorite reason for playing online… you don’t have to wear any pants.
So why is live poker still a popular option, even among top internet players? Because playing poker in a live setting makes you feel like you are alive.
Playing poker in a casino is a visceral experience. Online poker is essentially a video game, devoid of human interaction. In real life, you can hear the clattering of the chips as players toss them into the pot or do chip tricks in between hands. You can hear the sounds of action at the adjacent tables as players unleash their emotions after a bad beat or after they win a big pot. If you local card room is located inside a casino, you are bombarded with the sounds of slot machines, roulette wheels, and gamblers having a fun time at the craps tables. A lot of players, myself included, get intoxicated by the gambler’s rush which is aided by the surrounding sounds of a casino environment. Heck, you can also smell the action, from the cheap perfume on an old lady in seat 3 to the foul smelling guy in seat 6 who has not showered in days.
A lot of players, myself included, get intoxicated by the gambler’s rush.
A lot of poker players prefer live poker because there are strategic elements that come into play that you wouldn’t otherwise make note of during an online session. Physical tells are a tremendous factor in live poker. The best players don’t play the cards, they play the person and that’s a lot easier in real life when you are scanning your opponents’ body language to make the best possible decision. And of course, advanced players use false tells to try to trick or confuse their opponents.
Ongame Network combining the best of two worlds at EIG.
I can usually spot the newer players, just by the way they carry themselves at the table. They fumble with their chips and they don’t protect their cards while they look at them. Online players with very little live playing experience are also easily to spot out. They talk a good game and know how to play, but they don’t handle chips very well. They also take a little longer to count out chips than the average player. They also give off more physical tells than the regular live game player, mainly because they don’t usually practice sitting still during online sessions.
Playing in a live setting forces you to concentrate more. If you are playing online poker at home, there are too many distractions available to you at your finger tips (like surfing websites or reading poker forums or even downloading porn). In a live game, you are more prone to focusing at the task at hand. Sure, you will be getting dealt less hands per hour, but you have the opportunity to study your opponents during the down time.
For online games, the only tells you can pick up are based on betting patterns. In real life, you can pick up on different aspects of your opponents’ game from paying close attention to random things such as their reactions when they look at their hole cards or the reaction to the cards once the dealer lays out the flop. You can gauge whether a player is bluffing or has a hand by the way they bet. Did they toss chips into the pot nonchalantly? Or did they emphatically slam down a stack in front of them? Did they calmly push out their bet or were they agonizing about the call? All of those little things are hidden during online play, but all of that extra information is right in front of you in a live setting. The better players will pick up on the minor details, process that information, and use it in the future. That’s how they gain an edge over their opponents.
Probably the most important aspect of playing live poker is the entire visceral experience. When you win a pot, the dealer pushes the chips your way. There’s nothing better in poker than having a monster pot shoved in front of you and it takes two or even three hands to stack up all of your chips. As technological influences on everyone’s life rapidly increase, humans are being pushed farther apart. But live poker brings people together who would usually be playing alone in their homes. Whenever people gather and exchange ideas and engage in discussion, that’s considered social progress. In today’s world, it seems that computers and machines are becoming more dominant so any bit of human interaction is a good thing.
And in the end, nothing is better than sitting at a poker table with a mountain of chips in front of you, as your opponents are quivering with fear.
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