In my recent job assignment, I’ve been in San Diego most of the last two months, with occasional weekend trips home. As such, I’ve had a good amount of time to play poker online in my hotel room most nights, about as much as I might at home. Being out here on weekends, however, I’ve also had occasion to visit several live card rooms in the Southern California area, an opportunity I rarely have when I’m with my wife and children every night. I also took a weekend trip to Vegas, where I played at the Luxor (a harmless way to kill a couple of hours on a Saturday night, although not particularly recommended) and at the Bellagio (where I had the privilege to rail Puggy Pearson in a 40/80 stud game less than two weeks before he passed, while waiting for my 2/5 NL game). <READMORE>

Having had my recent playing experiences, it’s struck me a little harder than usual when I’ve had three different players in the last week, at two different sites, tell me and the rest of my table “this online thing is bullshit, live poker is real poker, I’d kill you guys in a casino” etc. etc. etc. The implication is that poker in a bricks-and-mortar cardroom is better or harder than its online variant, which is always something that bothered me before my recent live play. If you can play, you can play. Period. The “online play sucks” theorem, in my opinion, is usually proclaimed the loudest by people who get smoked playing online for one reason or another. But there are differences which are important to understand if you wish to be successful in either form of the game.

1) At comparable stakes, online games are harder. The super-casual player who chooses to stumble into a poker game will normally play at one of the lower stakes available to them. Online, that’s .25/.50 or so, maybe up-to $1/$2 limit, with the higher limit games being populated more with players who have worked their way up from lower limits. I have played in a lot of $1/$2 or $2/$4 NL games online that didn’t have one bad player in them…some were better than others, but nobody was a fish who didn’t belong. In my $1/$1/$2 NL game at Luxor, half the table would call big raises pre-flop with any ace, and keep calling when the flop and turn didn’t help them. I have never played an online game at those stakes that was 1/10th as juicy as that live game, and I wished like hell I didn’t have other commitments to keep that night.
2) Live games are slower. It’s not just the physical act of the dealer managing a pot and shuffling the deck, although that adds up. It’s people taking three minutes to stare everyone down like they’re on TV making a million-dollar decision. I was at a NL game at Pechanga, northeast of San Diego, where half of my $2/$3 NL table was wearing baseball hats, sunglasses, hooded sweatshirts, you name it. The funny part is that I’m not particularly experienced with interpreting live tells, and you could tell they weren’t either. My eyes could have widened until they fell out of my head when my nut flush came on the turn, then I could have stood up to do the Happy Heiney Dance, and it wouldn’t have been a clear enough tell. So what good was the Phil Laak getup? If I was running a live cardroom, I’d put a 60-second clock on every decision at tables lower than $500 buy-ins, and if you wanted to ban sunglasses and hats, I wouldn’t protest that either.
3) Card droughts and bad beats are harder to deal with live. This ties in directly with the pace of a live game, but I think multi-tabling online also keeps a player (me, at least) from dwelling on a bad beat, because there’s new cards in the air every 15 seconds if you’re 3-tabling. At Pechanga I took a 1-outer on the river for my nut flush to lose to a straight flush…and then I went card dead for about five orbits. That was not a fun way to spend 90 minutes, folding rags and stewing over my dumb luck. It’s good to know that I can maintain some semblance of discipline and focus in that circumstance. But I’d prefer not to.
4) Civility still exists live. I can’t play in one sit-and-go tournament online without having players call each other donkeys, jerkoffs, child molesters, assholes, etc. Last night in a $100 SNG on Full Tilt, I had a guy curse me out repeatedly after I didn’t agree with him strongly enough that another guy sucked. Those kinds of things just don’t happen in live rooms. I was a little disturbed by the number of people who whoop and holler over wins in a poker room like it was a craps table…one guy was making so much noise at Ocean’s 11 in Oceanside, CA, that I thought he was putting his life savings on the line in their biggest NL game and putting his kids through Harvard from his latest-and-greatest river suckout. So I walked over after a smoke break and saw his game was $2/$4. Limit. He had about $50 in front of him. But I’ll take that any day instead of the professional wrestling wannabes online.
5) Live poker is a physical thing. The act of counting out a stack of chips, or pushing all of yours in, takes more of a commitment than just clicking the “max” button on your online poker interface. It’s not as easy to make a bet lightly. I know a lot of people love the adrenaline rush that comes with the physical act of playing live…some guys get off on raking pots, stacking chips, trying to maintain their façade when bluffing. And that’s great. It’s not me, but I’m glad people like what they like.

Now, all of this probably seems really obvious, material that people have written about before, which could lead one to wonder why I wrote it this time. “What’s your point?” you say. Well, I think it’s VERY important to try and get a read, if you can, about who plays more in casinos than they do on their computers. As I’ve pointed out, there are differences than run both ways. Most people respect the challenges from a live game versus online. If you can find someone who doesn’t respect the different challenges the other way, your online game can be richly rewarded. Those players are more likely to make calls on bigger bets pre-flop, and not respect your big bets with big hands. They will think you’re bluffing all the time, because that’s what all of those online donkeys do (I think that’s a direct quote from Mike Matusow, a classic example of what I’m talking about…great live player, terrible online). The live player will often times have difficulty in adjusting to the pace of an online game in terms of number of hands seen and time to make each decision, which means they will make more mistakes.

So next time you hear someone complaining about online poker while at your favorite site, start up some friendly chatter. Find out how much they play live, where, what stakes, whatever information they’re willing to share. It’ll be worth the keystrokes. Online poker isn’t better or worse than live poker…it’s just different. You can profit from those who don’t get understand that as well as you do.
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