My Christmas gift arrived yesterday. Yes, my brand new monitor that I bought for myself. I'm in love. I got to play poker for nearly three hours on it, and it's unbelievable. It's a whole new ballgame. Of course, I have to wait a long time before I get to use it again because....
I also leave for Costa Rica today. In fact, my plane takes off in five and a half hours. I should really be getting some sleep, but nothing stands between me and my reader(s)!
Costa Rica should be a lot of fun. Aside from the warm weather, hot girls and sunny beaches (and, hopefully, scuba diving!), there will be some casino poker action. I can't wait, although I am a little cautious.
You see, I used to be a live player. Online was only moderately successful to me, but I was making a killing playing live. In recent months, though, I've turned to online play mostly because like a hooker in Vegas, it's always there, cheap and easy. As a result, while my online play has improved in leaps and bounds, my live play has suffered dramatically. I used to be a shark. I could read people. I could sit there and watch the lesser players and watch as their faces told the entire story of what was going on in their minds. One could literally see them coming to a decision, and based on how they looked upon reaching that decision, one could gain lots of information.
The best players to read were online players who only rarely played live. They would wear their emotions on their sleeve, as the saying goes. If they were shocked, they showed it. Disappointed, they showed it. If they thought you missed the flop and were raising to find out (thinking, "oh, he probably just has AK"), they showed the entire process of their devious plotting on their faces, complete with the look over that said "oh, now let's see how he reacts to THAT." Of course that was an instant three-bet in my book.
But now I'm the online player! My few recent attempts at live play have shown me that 1) I can't read people the way I used to and 2) They can read me better than they used to. I was recently playing a very casual laid back game with friends (occasional, recreational players all of them) and I was screwing up reads like crazy. I played at Canterbury Park during my recent trip to Minnesota and I don't doubt based on other people's reactions that I was letting way too much emotion show.
It's really distressing because the two games, while fundamentally the same, are very different. Online you have pokertracker, your cards, and a betting pattern, that's it. Live, you have to do pokertracker in your head, watching and learning how people do things. And you have to read people, plain and simple. Are they strong? Are they weak? Are they betting differently this time than they usually do? Live play also takes a lot more patience. I can see 300 hands an hour four-tabling 6-max tables online. Live, if a dealer can get out over 30 hands an hour, that's fantastic. Online, the skill is in not getting overwhelmed by the sheer rapidity of it all; live the skill is sometimes just to stay awake and alert!
My poker career has gone through phases, from playing lots live, to playing lots online, to playing lots live again and now I'm back to playing lots online. And during each period, because of the different skill set between live and online play, I always seem to do relatively poorly playing the "other" way.
Yet here I go, deeply entrenched in an online phase, ready to play in a live casino in another country having not posted any type of legitimate win in live play since mid-October.
Wish me luck! I'll be back in a week, hopefully with good news to report.
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