With all of the uncertainty surrounding online poker, many poker players are considering transitioning from online play to live play. Whether they’re making the move full-time or simply balancing their play between the two worlds, some adjustments are required to make live poker profits line up with online poker expectations.
Let’s start with the obvious: When you play internet poker, you can play what amounts to an endless amount of tables and opponents. Live poker does not afford that luxury – you get one table at a time and a much smaller player pool (unless you travel to play). Adjusting to that change of pace is perhaps one of the biggest challenges that an online poker player in going to face.
While the pace might be slower, in some ways you have more – or at least different – information to process when you’re playing live poker, and you also need to process it in different ways. That’s because your sample size in live poker is rarely going to approach what you get with online poker, so your decision making will involve more hunches and speculation than you might have to engage in online with a full HUD drawing on tens of thousands of hands.
That’s not to say that live poker is altogether different that online poker. The rules and the basic strategy are still the same – for example, the question “how to play in early position” has the same answer (tight) for both games – it’s the format that’s different. Think of it as horse racing on a dry track versus horse racing on a wet one. It’s still horse racing, but the skills and strategy needed to succeed do change somewhat.
Some thing about the transition can be summed up in an article, while others require hours at the table to learn. Here’s to you making the leap successfully without having to pay an undue amount of money for those lessons.
