An often little understood factor in playing poker online or anywhere for that matter is that unless you have done it before then it can feel very strange. Even if you are in fact an experienced online or live card room player then if you are playing in a different game or playing against different players then it will take you time to find your feet and feel comfortable with your new surroundings.

Many successful live players have failed online and vice versa of course and wondered what the reasons were. Well you need to understand that if you play 20-40 limit hold’em in a live card room then it is not going to be the same online despite the fact that you are still playing 20-40 limit.

Your poker game should be workable in any environment and this was why I needed to add this because any player that can really only play in one or the other is quite handicapped, a bit like a car driver who can only drive automatics and not manuals. For instance many players who have only ever played live poker and especially the older ones can struggle with the vastly accelerated pace of online play.

Especially when those audio prompts start to kick in which I find really off putting when I am contemplating a big decision in a big NL Texas Holdem pot. When that starts to happen, it is very easy to just get swept along with the momentum in some kind of “brain freeze” where all you end up doing is staring at the screen blankly. Likewise if all you have ever played is online poker and you play in a real card room, you have been playing entirely in an environment where showing your emotions does not matter because no one can see you.

But behaving in a way that makes your hand strength an open book to savvy street wise players has turned many a good online player into a live game loser. Also the mentality of the players can change as well from site to site, do not make the mistake of thinking that all of the sites are the same. This was another mistake that I made early in my career. I used to assume that the players on any one site would be more or less the same mix….wrong.

I was a very good Limit Hold’em player early in my career and yet I was struggling to get ahead early in my semi-professional career (before I turned pro). Then the reason for me dragging my heels struck me. I was playing on a site that was populated very heavily by Americans and the players over there are far more skilled on average at Limit play than anywhere else, I mean that is the form of poker that they are brought up with. The Europeans just do not play limit poker in any quantity, it is pot limit over here and pot limit Omaha especially.

Then it hit me, my edge would be seriously diminished by playing against more skilled players, sure I was earning money but it wasn’t enough. I am a far better Limit player now than I was then and I have to confess that this may have attributed for part of the problem at that time but the fact remains that you want to be playing on a site where your edge is at its maximum.

So I shifted my action to European sites whenever I was playing Limit Hold’em and never looked back. Suddenly I was playing the same game but this time against Europeans who did not understand that game on average as well as the Americans. Now that I have switched to playing No Limit, the game is so widely played and so well known that I cannot see any discernable difference between the players in Europe from America on the whole.

Also even in No Limit Holdem poker games, there are subtle differences from players that come from different countries. Some are more aggressive than others, some like to limp in and see flops while others will only enter the pot raising. It is well worth being aware of the geographical location of the players on your table and what this could potentially mean.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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