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TELEVISED VS. ONLINE POKER: APPLES AND ORANGES |
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As you will have noticed, poker has taken a gigantic leap in popularity over the past few years, due mostly to the tandem developments of televised and online poker - the former being largely watched, and the latter largely played. The problem is that despite sharing almost identical rules, they are extremely different games that don't translate very well to one another.
Here's why:
1. NO TELLS
The first and biggest difference between online and televised poker is the absence of reliable tells. In a live game with real players there's a whole host of physical indicators you can look for to help you figure out what sort of hand your opponent has, from the way your opponent stacks his chips to the way he looks at the cards.
In online play there are no physical tells; the only 'reliable' source of information outside of your opponent's actual play is what he types in the chat window - assuming he types anything at all. And given that 80-90% of what someone says is usually tied up in their body language and voice inflection, that little bit of chat you get isn't worth much at all.
So how does this impact your online strategy?
For starters, it makes it a lot more difficult to bluff or make risky calls, because you have very little way of knowing how strong your opponent's hand is. Say you've called a preflop raise with 99 and the flop comes J84. Your opponent bets 2/3 of the pot and the action is on you after the other two players fold. In a live game you would have scrutinized your opponent's reaction to the flop and taken note of the way he bet his chips, carefully studying his tone and body language. You might even try to trip him up with a question or two about the strength of his hand.
In an online game the only 'extra' information you have to go on is your previous experience with that player, assuming you've had any at all. You can't read his face, hands or posture, and with only 20 seconds to decide, chatting him up isn't much of an option either. At this point position and stack size are your main criteria for deciding whether to call, raise or fold.
2. THEY'RE PROS
Most of the players you see at the final table of a televised tournament make their living at poker and have been doing so for years. When pros play pros poker morphs into a completely different game, one based far less on the cards and odds and much more on the players themselves. Before entering a major tournament many pros spend hours or even days reviewing footage of their opponents with hopes of discerning personalized betting patterns and tells. They then adjust their play based on this secret arsenal, making folds, calls, bets and raises that would otherwise make absolutely no sense.
For this reason televised poker can sometimes seem rather chaotic. But in reality it's actually much more structured than most online poker because a certain level of play is expected before the cards even hit the table. For example most pros throw away weak aces in early position, fold TT to a reraise and are hesitant to chase a flush if the board is paired. In other words, they're smart.
Amateurs, i.e. 99% of the online contingent, haven't played or analyzed their play enough to realize that most mediocre hands/draws should probably be thrown away under any serious pressure. Because of this it's much more difficult to decipher what an anonymous online opponent might be holding. They could just as easily have A2 as AK, bottom pair as top pair, or a gutshot draw as a straight flush draw. You simply have no way of knowing.
So, much like our situation with an absence of tells, the amateur component forces you to tighten up, making fewer bluffs and fewer risky bets and calls. It also forces you to standardize your play, basing most of your decisions on table position, stack size, blind levels and pot odds.
In other words, online poker is more about math and less about psychology.
3. ISOLATED PLAY
Few, if any, televised events show each hand of the tournament from start to finish, for obvious reasons: there are too many tables; there isn't enough time; it would be way too boring.
Live, single-table poker runs at a mere 30-40 hands per hour. More often than not the stakes aren't high enough or the moves bold enough to warrant coverage, so what we end up seeing is a very condensed, high-drama compilation of a tournament that may have ran or been running for days. Players who may have spent most of the tournament patiently folding off camera are shown making crazy calls or bluffs, risking most or all of their entire stack on what seems to be a very weak hand.
Now to be fair, there are quite a few maniacs out there, even some professional ones. But most of the time you see a pro making a 'bad' play on TV, one or all of three factors are in place: 1) it's late in the tournament, with the blinds and antes so big that risk-taking is a must; 2) the 'maniac' has a 'read' on the rest of the table, making his/her play much more calculated than it appears; 3) he/she is on tilt. In other words, this is not the way the player in question USUALLY plays.
Much like any other TV program, poker specials rely on ratings in order to pay the bills. And what makes for good ratings? Drama. In the poker world, drama means gutsy bluffs, risky calls, big showdowns and big all ins. The later in the tournament the better, with potentials losses/gains (and therefore tensions) running extremely high.
Unfortunately for the eager amateur, this broadcasting of highly isolated play creates an inverse ratio wherein the educational value drops as the entertainment value goes up. What most beginners really need to know is how to play low stakes cash games and tournaments against other amateurs, not whether to fold or call all in with A6 heads up against Gus Hansen for a $3.7M purse.
4. INSIDE INFORMATION
Most poker fans are aware of the fact that the enormous recent popularity of televised (and thus, online) poker can all be reduced to one simple invention: the hole cam (a.k.a. "hole card cam"). Without it we wouldn't know the players' hands, which would make watching the game about as much fun as listening to So You Think You Can Dance on the radio. (Actually, come to think of it, that might be better.)
Not only does the hole cam allow us, the viewer, to closely follow the game; it also provides us with more information than any single player at the table, giving us a sense of omniscience we could never get from actually playing. Once again this makes for high entertainment value with a correspondingly low educational value. Here's why:
Knowing all of the players' cards gives us all the information we need to make near-perfect decisions on behalf of whatever player we're watching at the time. If our player raised preflop with AQ and faces a reraise all in from AJ, we know with certainty that the correct decision is to call, and we will shake out heads if he folds. On the other hand, if instead of AJ our opponent has AA, we will shake our heads if he calls.
The thing to note here is that we, the viewer, will always be right, much like an armchair football fan who could easily see that the wide receiver was way open, if only that stupid quarterback had opened his eyes. The key difference, however, is that the football fan doesn't switch off his TV, put on shoulder pads and walk out the door hoping to win the Super Bowl. Doing so would be sheer stupidity, because even if he had an amazing technical understanding of the sport, he still wouldn't have the necessary experience (and related skills) to compete at the professional level. He'd get crushed, and everyone knows it.
So why don't poker fans share a similar sense of humility? The answer, I believe, is twofold: 1) They still think luck is a major factor, having seen many players win despite overwhelmingly bad odds; 2) They think anyone can do it, having seen many "amateurs" win major televised tournaments.
Of course the missing ingredient here is, once again, experience. Seasoned poker players know that over time we all get similar doses of good and bad "luck", no matter how long a streak seems to last. We also know that while many amateurs do make it deep into major tournaments, the majority of faces at most final tables are quite familiar, and for a very good reason: they've played a lot of poker and are very good at it.
The main thing to keep in mind when making the move from televised poker to online player is that they're very different games, despite having similar rules and odds. Televised poker is based on real people, mainly professionals, playing for high stakes, with all sorts of inside information provided, including hole cams, player biographies, and expert commentary. Online poker is based on virtual players, largely amateur, usually playing for low stakes, with little to no inside information.
In addition, online players must contend with time limits, multiple tables, connection problems, and a whole host of other factors that point, for the most part, to a tighter, more standardized game based largely on starting hand selection, table position, stack size, blind levels and pot odds. Of course as the stakes go up and the number of players per tables goes down, it does start to more closely resemble live poker. But I would hope by the time you reach that point you aren't reading an article like this.
J.P. Stimpson |
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