Practice Poker Online
If you’re a regular player in a home poker game or at your local casino, playing online can be a great way to practice poker without having to leave the house. Just spending a few hours a week practicing online will make you a much better player and you’ll begin to see the results almost immediately. Even if you’re not a big fan of the online game and prefer the live experience for the social aspect, putting in some work on your game at home will help makes your trips to your local game more profitable.
How Can Playing Online Help Me?
Taking the time to practice poker online can help you in a number of ways and provide a lot benefits that you simply won’t get by playing live:
- Volume of Hands: The online game is much quicker, so once you get a handle on the software at whatever site you choose to play on you’ll be playing on average 3 times the number of hands at a single table than you would at a casino, or 6 times if you’re brain moves quickly enough to handle two tables. This means that you’ll learn the game six times as fast as if you were playing live, allowing you to try new things and experiment and see the results much more quickly.
- Little or Nothing at Risk: In a casino, the minimum stakes usually equate to 1/2 in €,£, $ or whatever your local currency is. This means if you’re only learning the game or if you want to experiment with a looser or more aggressive style, it could cost you a lot of money in a very short space of time. If you practice online, you can play for stakes as low as 1c/2c. Even the worst players will take quite a while to lose a lot of money at these stakes!
- Forums, Training Videos and Tracking Software: Online poker has a huge support network around it. All of the hands you play are logged to your PC and if you’re not sure about how you played a certain hand, you can post it up on one of the many internet poker forums such as 2+2 where other players will give you advice.
Furthermore there are training sites where you can subscribe and watch professional poker players while they play and detail their thought process during each hand that they are in. Lastly there are poker tracking software packages that import all of your played hands and analyse them for you. They will show you a number of stats that reflect how you play, and these stats can be posted on the forums for you to get some advice.
One thing to be wary of if you sign up to an online site is the play money option. A lot of new players think that starting out at the play money tables is a good way to learn poker. The truth is that play money is really only useful for learning the rules of the game, or for getting used to the software if you’re new to a site.
The level of play at play money tables doesn’t give a good indication of how a real game plays and in fact may teach you some bad habits. Players have nothing at risk and so don’t care and will be making all sorts of strange plays which you won’t see at a real money table. The same goes for you. It’s very easy to lose motivation when nothing is at risk. Even if you deposit $20 and play at the 2c/4c tables you’ll start to see players trying a little harder because there’s a few dollars at stake. Even though it’s not a lot, it still makes a big difference in the standard of play.
We definitely recommend that you give online poker a try and see how much of an impact it will have on your success at the live tables!
Have a look at our Poker Guide and you should be able to find a room to suit you
