So where do you play Texas Hold’em poker? Are you the type of player who sits in casino card rooms feeling frustrated at seeing nothing more than thirty hands per hour if you are lucky? Or are you the super high tech type of poker player who has twelve tables minimised on an enlarged computer monitor with pokeroffice and a HUD (head up display) along with a good rakeback deal thrown in for good measure?

Or do you fall somewhere in between and play a little online poker and play live as well. Of course, no two people fit into the same category. But I think that it is vitally important that players from both poker spheres respect the environment of the other. It is this lack of respect or lack of knowledge or whatever you want to call it that has led to the ruin of many a poker player who has tried their hand in the other environment.

To be fair, at this moment in time then the online game is the toughest in which to try and show a profit. I know people who had only ever played in private home games prior to the internet online era. These are zero sum games unless the host charges for the game in some way. What this means is that the sum total of all the money that is won in the game equals the sum total of all the money that is lost.

But in online games then this is not the case because of the rake. The effect of the rake is increased the lower you play as the rake becomes a bigger percentage of the average pot size. So is the answer to play bigger games? Well not quite, the only problem with playing bigger games is that you will then encounter better players and if you move beyond certain limits then you will encounter very good players indeed.

What you must understand is that anyone can log onto a card room from anywhere in the world. This will mean that for all you know, you could easily be locking horns with some of the very best players in the world in some of the games who are using very sophisticated poker strategy. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that unless you are playing a WPT champion then you are on safe ground because you could not be more wrong.

Online players are far more serious about their games now than what they were when I first started playing online full time in 2002. The sites themselves do their best to educate the players and why shouldn’t they? After all it is in their interests to protect their players and what better way to do that than to educate them! Please be on the lookout for part two of this series coming soon where I will be looking at more comparisons between online poker and live poker.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Winning Cash Game Poker”

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