Offline vs Online Poker
If you've played both forms of poker before, I'm sure some of these points will be obvious. For those who haven't ventured into a casino to play poker, or haven't tried online poker, some of these differences may not be so obvious.
The tells are completely different
In a live situation, tells common tells include:
How players present chips when betting. Do they sprinkle them in front of themselves, or present them in neat stacks.
How often and when a player looks at their cards
Whether they talk less or more in a hand
Online, players chat much less. After all, people in general are more comfortable with talking than they are with typing.
Online, tells include:
The speed with which a player decides what to do. Sometimes the action is so quick you know the player had the "raise any" button checked ahead of time.
The speed of the game is markedly different
Online poker is wayyy faster. No time is spent collecting cards, shuffling them, changing dealers, moving chips or counting them. Play is so fast it sometimes resembles a videogame. You will be playing at least twice as many hands online in the same amount of time.
This leads to one of the truths about playing poker online. Small holes in your game become big holes because they are explioted twice as often. This can be frustrating because many players will be fine with losing a couple of bucks to play recreational poker in a face to face setting. Online, that loss is often doubled, and they cannot believe the "sudden" turn of bad luck they are experiencing.
Online Players call a LOT
It is so much easier to push a button on a computer than it is to grab a pile of chips and move them into the pot while everyone is watching you intently. Maybe that's one of the reasons online players call often.
Maybe it's because they suspect everyone else of bluffing since you can't read a person's face or body language over the internet. But, online players call often. So often that a player who relies on bluffing as a major part of his game will be relieved of a lot of their chips as they mumble "How can you call my all-in with those cards?".
Online players are usually anonymous
While a lot of poker played in casinos is against a group of players you haven't met before, home games or local tournaments often provide familiar competition. Familiar competition means you already have an idea of what players do in certain situations, you may also have a list of tells on them. Either way, it gives you extra information to use at the tables.
Online poker against anonymous players means you may find yourself being bowled over in a hand by a maniac. You may be caught being extra aggressive when in a pot against a rock. It surely means you have less information to use, and your decisions might be correct less often.
Online Poker has the following advantages over casino poker . . .
Lower Rake - Rake is the fee that a poker room takes out of every pot at a cash game. Online rooms charge less than brick and mortar rooms do. They also charge lower entry fees for poker tournaments than brick and mortar card rooms do.
Free Tables - not something you find at a brick and mortar room. You can play poker for free at any of the online rooms.
Micro and Nano-limit Games. These tables are nickel and dime, or sometimes even penny-ante poker games. It gives players a chance to play real money poker for pocket change.
Poker Bonuses - this is just different. Casino poker rooms offer comps like hotel stays, dinners or shows. Online rooms offer a constant stream of cash bonuses to their regular players, as well as player rewards programs.
No tips - unlike at a casino, you will not have to tip an online computer dealer.
Poker tools and note-taking - in an online room everything is recorded. There is a complete record of what cards were dealt to whom, who called/bet/raised or folded, there is a record of what was said at the tables, everything is recorded.
Because everything is recorded, it's like having all of your plays on film. You can get programs that will store all of the information about your playing. They can then be used to analyze anything about your play. Insightful players use these tools to find and close holes in their games, find tendancies in their opponents and take notes on them, and make overall improvements in their play.
In a brick and mortar room, once the cards are muck and reshuffled, any hand information is lost. And worse, often the hand information that is committed to memory is selective, incomplete, or just plain wrong.
Multi-table Play - is available online. Since the better part of playing holdem is look at your hole cards and fold them, some players are capapble of playing more than one table at a time and still keep track of the game. This can be done online, but obviously you can only play one table at a time in a casino or home game environment.
Cheating - is a worry both online and face to face. The methods are different. In a live game players may mark cards or signal others. If it's a private game with players dealing, there are new cheating worries that open up.
Online, players with multiple accounts, or players colluding with each other through cell phones and the like are the main worries.
Either way, it is safe to say that although most games are legitimate, there will always be players looking to gain an unfair advantage.
Cashing Out - is handled better in a live game setting. You turn your chips into money at the cage or with the house banker, and leave with spendable cash. Online, it can take days for money to make its way from the poker room to your wallet.
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