Rolled On The River

Throughout 2005, my sole income was from playing live poker. Thanks to this, I feel I better understand the aspect of grinding, and now that I play online can clearly depict the difference between the two. Essentially, every evening I would arrive at the casino, join the waiting list for the highest running Limit Hold’em games, and then jump on the first available table. It’s also worth noting that I never stuck to the one table if I knew there was a better one going. As soon as I found a seat, I ensured that I stayed on the waiting list for other tables – if a better one became available then I would move to it. The most important thing about playing live poker is being able to sit in the best game available; you’re only playing one table and you need to ensure that you’re making it the best possible table.

Live poker, although easier to beat overall (no live player should ever kid themselves, the average live player is most definitely less skilled then the average online player), does have very different upsides and downsides to online poker. The advantages of online play should be quite apparent – you can play more tables, you can track your income and opponents quite easily with various software packages, you can get rakeback, and you can also find a good game with a good structure and soft opponents at virtually any time. If I had to make a recommendation to an aspiring professional poker player, I would most certainly recommend that they play online poker over live poker.

So what are the advantages of live poker? Well for one, you’re meeting people. Online poker players lose a lot of interaction, and essentially have a desk job that doesn’t bring them around people. If you’re a people person, you’re going to prefer live poker. This isn’t to say that online players aren’t sociable people, as I personally have found quite the opposite and would argue quite vigorously that they are. I’m also of the impression that your average big blinds per hour is higher at a live table than it is at the equivalent stake online table (and I still believe this after taking rake and game structures into consideration). Why? In my experience live tables are generally much better in that value bets get called thinner, and the saturation of information at a live table allows you to squeeze more money out of your opponents than you typically could with the absence of physical reads / tells. One thing to keep in mind is that although physical tells are quite prevalent in live play, the average opponent puts too much emphasis on them. The play of a hand and your opponents’ tendencies should be your first and foremost source of information when making your decisions – ie. use tells as a method of enforcing or questioning your decisions, not making them.

Another interesting point about live poker is table talk. A lot can be learnt about a hand just played even if you weren’t the one in it. Let’s assume that you see a hand where you suspect that Villain A beat Villain B with two pair. A simple statement such as “I knew you had a set there!” although untrue, if presented in a berating manner, will often cause Villain A to either defend himself (which will give you more information), or Villain B to provide you with more information about what he was thinking in the hand. As an example of the latter, I observe a hand where Villain A bets the flop and in turn and is called by Villain B on both streets; however, when he bets small on the river, Villain B folds. I can’t see many feasible hands that Villain A could have been representing, and I’m curious as to why Villain B folded. By simply saying something along the lines of “I knew you had a set the whole way, nice hand” to Villain A, you will sometimes get Villain B jumping in saying something like “No, he had a straight,” or “No, he had Aces.” – giving you information about how Villain B thinks.

Why do most live professionals not last very long? Well, in the most part I’ve found that, on average, they don’t put in enough hours. Live poker is a modest income at best; without playing fairly high stakes and without logging the hours you will often not last very long. During the time that I played live for a living, I saw many aspiring live professionals come and go – some of which had games I truly respected. On the most part these players would start off logging eight to ten hour days, but over time this would drop to one or two days a week. The pattern here? A lot of players would run good at some time or another and make the assumption that this is maintainable, causing them to play less. Making $200 / hour at $5/$10 Limit Hold’em is a very good heater, but it isn’t maintainable. Just because you have managed to do this for two or three sessions in a row, certainly doesn’t mean this is going to continue being the case.