Online poker can be the start of a very lucrative career. If you track online poker players you will
see that a very large number dominate live poker events. David Baker for instance has won his first
bracelet at event 18 at the 2010 World Series of Poker, and David started with online poker. In fact
most of the top tournament players on the WSOP tour are online poker players or started that way.
I don’t mean to say that playing online will be anyone’s ticket to fame and money, you still have to
know how to play poker. Here is the rub, everybody thinks they can play poker well but have no
earthly idea how to calculate “pot odds”, or why 7 / 2 off suit is the worse hand in Texas Hold em.
You must begin with poker math and when you learn that you start the real work. For example the guy in
early position is a maniac and it’s a wonder he is still in the game, in the last 40 hands he has
played in 23 of them, he always comes in with the same raise, always 3x the big blind, you are holding
AJ suited in last position.
This is where poker gets challenging, yes it helps to know that against a random hand you will win 67%
of the time, helpful but you must be able to play the person not the cards. Here is where real poker
players earn their money, and I am willing to bet you that poker pro’s will have one basic answer while
poker students will be all over the place.
A lot of people will look at this and think I know what I would do, and some will say that they don’t
have enough information (I’ll let you guess which are the pro’s) in any case online poker gives you
the ability to get very good at making these decisions over thousands of hands that you can start out
playing for free.
All of this is to say that online poker can really change your life if you are open to being a student
of the game and have the discipline to learn and apply what you learn without exception. Or it can be
just entertainment, mind you most entertainment you have to pay for so keep that in mind when you are
sitting at the table with less than you started with.
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