Beginner's (Un)luck: Poker Software to Blame?

While I play live poker from time to time throughout the year, I play more during the World Series of Poker (WSOP) than the entire rest of the year. This year, I was again reminded of how many players there are who have tried online poker, lost their deposits a few times, and given up. Some very solid players tell this story and they are almost all completely in the dark about why they beat live games, but cannot manage to beat the games online with any consistency. If that describes you, or you still play online but can't figure out why the games seem so much harder to beat consistently, keep reading.

The first problem most live have when they switch to online poker is that they start playing at the same limit or move down a single limit. This just isn't enough. I don't care what any big name, old school pro has to say about it, it is a simple fact that in terms of strategy and skill level, the online game is drastically tougher than the brick and mortar game.

It hasn't always been that way, but nowadays, a typical online game plays around five times as tough as a live game. That means if you play $1/$2 live, you should be playing either $0.10/$0.25 or $0.25/$0.50. Because there are so many solid grinders at $0.25/$0.50, I recommend most live players start at a dime-quarter game online.

Many live players think this is a big drop in stakes and they won't make any money, but when you see two to three times as many hands per table per hour and you can multi-table, the win rate can be even better than it would be in the bigger game online. With rakeback, it gets even better because live games are raked so heavily.

The second problem is that many live players never stick with online poker long enough to adjust to it. In some ways, poker is a game of seniority. Those who have played longer have often learned from their mistakes and they are the long-term winners. Online is a very different game requiring very different skills; jumping in and expecting to crush it right away without learning those skills is ridiculous.

Those unique skills often include poker software. If a live player sits down at an online table and starts to play, he lacks poker tracking software with a heads-up display (HUD), which puts him at a huge disadvantage. After 20 or 30 hands, he may have taken a note or two, but that's not a skill set he's familiar with either. While his opponents know how many times he has seen the flop, they can see each hand replayed instantly and he may already have an auto-rate icon next to his name. It's probably a fish or a whale.

If he has played at all recently, then the datamining sites already have hands on him and many of his opponents who have never seen him before already have a solid read on his game and he has no idea why. They may see that over 2,200 hands, he has never lost a pot after check-raising the turn and they can fold a big hand that they would have to pay off otherwise. He doesn't have that knowledge about them and he loses much bigger pots than he wins. If you’re a newbie to the online world, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Poker Software.

Our poor live player is probably also looking at a standard table with animations and avatars and lots of distracting junk that serious grinders got rid of long ago. They just see stacks and stats with no other distractions. A live player may not even know this can be done or he may still be trying to figure out how to fit three tables on his screen correctly. Meanwhile, the grinder to his left is playing four times as many tables with half of the effort because of a simple skin, an HUD setup, and Table Ninja. And he has better reads on his opponents because of the stats.

There is also a third reason that the live "winner" loses so much online. He may not be a winner at all. It's much easier for a weak player to lie to himself about his live poker results because almost no losing live players keep accurate track or their wins and losses. Ask around at your local poker room and you’ll find that almost everyone is at least a breakeven player. It doesn't add up, does it?

The live player who has believed he is a winning player for years is faced with the truth online when he has to redeposit over and over and he starts to hate it. Losing isn't so bad if you win sometimes too, but when you always end up with no money, the game isn't fun anymore. Thus the live player decides that online poker is rigged, that it's not real poker, or that it just isn't for him. Whatever he decides, it usually ends with a trip to his local poker room and the end of his online play.

If you don't make as much money as you think you should at the tables on your favorite poker site, think carefully about why that might be. It's often a problem you can fix.