A few short years ago, poker was only known to a few select men, usually associated with being held in the corner of a smoky card room filled with grumpy degenerate old men with no families or other ambition in life.  These days, it’s safe to say the majority of the game’s top talent does battle from the comfort of their own home computer over the virtual felt.  Distance or game availability is never a restriction on getting action anymore; you could be seated at a table online playing against players from Denmark, Germany, Russia, Australia, S. Korea, etc…(this has happened to me on numerous occasions).  What’s more, it’s astonishing to some, but most people would agree that the best players in the world today are in their twenties, playing millions of hands online and getting in more experience than any live pro could in their lifetime over multiple tables.  That’s not to discredit any of the old school live pros, of course.  It’s expected that the live pros think they are better than the new wave of internet pros, and vice versa, so here’s some candid thoughts of mine that have been circulating my thoughts as of late…

The Live Pro vs the Online Pro:

In my experience of seeing how live pros go about making their living, it’s suffice to say that they overall have a shittier quality of life.  Typically, they’re going to be in the older age group, before the internet boom (because a 20-25 year old playing live for a living is just absurd).  To get in their hands, they usually either have to make the trek to a local casino, or relocate so that they are near one.  And to me, when you start to play in a casino for a living night in, night out to the point where you and floorman Bob are best buddies toasting each other on Christmas Eve each year, it gets to be a very depressing existence.  You get stuck grinding 13 hour sessions while eating the same bad casino food repeatedly, developing a completely bizarre sleep schedule and overall bearing little semblance of a normal life.  You have no time for friends or meeting members of the opposite sex, let alone carry on a healthy relationship with a significant other.  Eventually your life fades to a blur of night and day, since you can never tell what the real world is like when you’re inside the poker room, and you eventually become distanced from reality and end up one of those bitter old men who’ve ended up living their entire lives in a casino. 

Granted, this may be a bit over-dramatic, but it’s not really that far from the truth.  I’ve frequented the Borgata since I turned 21 four years ago countless times and it amazes me that the same faces are there literally every time I go, and each time I see them again they’ve gotten a little wrinklier, skin’s paled and cracked a little from lack of sunlight, and their overall demeanor’s just a little dimmer.  It’s almost like visiting a retirement home at times, only these are guys who haven’t really hit middle age yet, aka the “real” mid-life crisis.  And because it is live, you are limited to playing one full ring table at a time, and even if you have Speedy Gonzales as your dealer, the maximum amount of hands you’re getting per hour is going to be 30ish.  That’s not including the amount of time it takes for slow players to act, count out chips to bet with, the floor coming over to settle some trivial dispute, changing out decks, coloring up chips, etc etc.  Overall it’s going to be a lot of time spent just sitting there.  If you play $2/5 NL at the Borgata, your rake is going to be $5 per half hour, or $10/hour, and at $5/10 NL, it’s $12/hour.  Over a standard 10 hour session, you’re looking at $100-$120 fee to play in the card room, not including tips for the watiresses who fetch you beverages.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love the semi-frequent trips to Atlantic City with my friends and hanging out at the noodle bar, playing some live poker.  But the point of this blog is to illustrate the contrast in lifestyles between the guys who play live as a profession as opposed to the guy who sit at home and clicks his mouse to victory. 

So what’s it like to be an online pro?  For starters, you don’t need to put in nearly as many hours.  The average workday is going to be no more than 4 hours a day, and that’s on a really ambitious day.  There is no travel required, which means no commute expenses (i.e. gas, tolls, car maintenance, train, bus, cab, valet parking, etc), which translates to time saved.  In fact, a 40 hour/week guy like me can still do this for a substantial portion of my income on just a couple of hours per day, roughly 4-5 days a week with plenty of breathing room if other things come up.  Instead of one table seated with 10 players, I prefer to play 6-max tables, and like all online pros, play multiple tables at a time.  When you get good at this not only does it become second nature, but you start to post some staggering winrates with tremendous efficiency.  As I mentioned, the average number of hands per hour you will be dealt at full live ring game will be under 30.  A typical 6-max cash game gets you about 100 hands/hr * however many tables you play; for example, 10 = 1,000 hands per hour.  So,

Live: 30 hands/hour * 10 hours = 300 hands

Online: 100 hands/hour * 2 hours * 10 tables = 2,000 hands

When you consider a player’s winrate, it is commonly measured by bb/100, or big blinds won per hundred hands.  Consider it sort of like a batting avg for MLB players.  Well, let’s say you’re a $2/5 NL live player whose winrate is astonishingly high, 5 bb/100 over a large sample.  That’s $25 per 100 hands * 10 hours = $250 profit.  Consider an internet pro whose winrate for $2/4 NL is 5 bb/100.  For a typical session, that’s $20 per 100 hands; or $400 over 2,000 hands for just 2 hours.  Now factor in things like rakeback/cash bonuses and you’ll start to see why learning how to play online successfully is akin to printing money, or at least churning out a very respectable monthly income. 

Those are some of the lifestyle differences.  Live pros have to report to work like any other job and often need to grind out unhealthy long sessions, while online pros are much more lenient with their time and can usually be found lounging in their boxers at their PC with ESPN on in the background (at least I know I do this).  What about differences in playing styles?  They’re almost playing two entirely different games.  The live pro is virtually clueless as to what 6 handed poker is, so their short-handed play is basically nonexistent, while the same could be said about online pros.  It’s interesting to see each of them out taken out of their element and forced to adjust. 

When I sit at a live table I almost instantly know how to spot the online pro.  They plug in their ipod, play with their Blackberry, and try to play a full ring table as if it’s a 6-max game online.  They raise liberally with speculative hands when people limp in, 3-bet light and overvalue top pair.  The problem with this is that when you’re at a table with only 5 other players beside you, blind stealing and picking up the dead money is almost essential to keeping up in the game.  That’s why the 6-max game is played at full throttle, and why it’s not for the faint hearted.  When you start raising 4-5 limpers with a hand like 6-7 sooooted, chances are it’s just going to get called by everybody and you’re left building a nice pot with 7 high….which isn’t necesarily always bad, but if you do it habitually you’re not going to hit often enough to make it really profitable in the long run.  In contrast, live players who take their shot at playing online 6-max cash games don’t realize that when they open limp, they are practically painting black stripes on themselves and begging predators to attack them at all costs.  Both of these are examples of failure to adjust, which is something a good player should constantly be aware of, even when they are in their own element.  You can’t make the same play every time in every scenario, or it becomes exploitable. 

One thing I will note about online players though, is that they do possess a significant edge – and it started when they were children: experience with games.  Many of the top players in the world are former hardcore gamers or card players, and when applied to online poker, really isn’t all that much different from playing an interactive puzzle/chess match…with lots of money as the pieces.  It’s just an entirely different skillset when you approach this game at the higher levels though, aside from knowing the proper plays and probabilities and what hand is favored over what, a lot of times you have to factor in variables that ultimately should decide your best course of action. 

For example, let’s say you hold KdQd and you’ve called a raise out of position vs a tight player and take a flop of Ad8d10s.  Live players love to check/call this to try and “hit,” and subsequently curse their “bad luck” when they miss on the river and have to fold.  The online pro will play this hand aggressively off the bat more often than not, knowing that a flop check/raise looks strong and will possibly fold out hands such as JJ, QQ, KK, weak A’s, 10-x, 9-9, etc etc.  Given the opponent’s course of action next, they begin to assign a range of hands and decide which play is appropriate next to yield the most +EV play (expected value).  And to balance their range, good players know to balance their check/raising range with both bluffs and monsters/sets/two pairs/semi-bluffs to continually put their opponent on the defensive, forcing them to give up pots when they miss and eventually frustrate them into committing a mistake for stacks. 

This isn’t to say live pros are totally incompetent; it would be wrong to strip them of any skill at all.  After all, they are grinding out a living playing cards, which isn’t easy for anyone to accomplish.  Most of them do have great instincts, and do not always see things as black & white as online players tend to do.  They probably do a much better job thinking outside the box, and often subconsciously make heroic calls or plays based solely on their gut, or maybe some subtle tell their opponent has given off and now they can sniff it out.  The internet guys don’t have the luxury of staring down an opponent in the eye to determine the strength of their hand; all they have to go by are pure betting patterns and the occasional “timing” tell, though this is pretty unreliable on the whole as their opponent could be delayed due to a variety of reasons (i.e. playing multiple tables, distracted by TV, going to the bathroom, playing with dog, etc).  I think the end result, over the course of hundreds of thousands of hands, is exceptional hand reading skills based on nothing else except how much an opponent bets, calls, raises, folds, checks, and when. 

This is getting to be quite a ramble so I’ll wrap it up.  In short, I truly believe online pros are the future of poker on the whole.  A lot of the tremendously successful internet players have recently just turned 21 and have already started to make some noise along the MTT rail, which is pretty damn impressive considering they almost never even play tournaments.  They cut through the fields like butter equipped with an arsenal of moves and knowledge.  I’d be surprised to see any more poker players in the future resort to playing live for a living, especially with the average age getting progressively younger. 

I didn’t get to play last night, and won’t be playing tonight because I (ironically) am playing my weekly live poker game with my friends, but I do intend on putting in at least 5k hands tomorrow to hopefully close out the month on a positive note.  Until next time, folks…thanks for reading any of this nonsense.