Hidden Danger of Online Poker

The biggest problem with online play is that it is unbelievably easy to let your mind wander, and this can be fatal in poker. You are in your own home in your own comfortable surroundings and the only poker that you see is an abstract representation on the screen in front of you.

You don't need to prepare for the session if you don't want to and you don't have to travel, either. In other words, you are running the risk of never entering into the correct mindset to play poker, which after all, is a mental game. If poker were just about playing the cards then there would be no such thing as a professional because too many people would quickly learn how to master the game if that was all there was to it.

When you go to a real-world cardroom, you are immersed in a total poker environment, and this helps you to focus. You don't let bad beats get to you because you don't want to lose face with the other players, and you try to look the part even if you are a total beginner. But at home, you can rant and rave to your heart's content and your opponents cannot hear you. But having the capacity to do this is damaging by itself because it is dragging you away from the proper and necessary equilibrium.

It is precisely for this reason that you should avoid playing online. You know the dangers of online poker and you also know your own weaknesses as well. People tend to lose concentraion after about four or five hours and this would be fatal in tournament poker. You should want to start playing poker and end playing poker on your own terms and not when some tournament clock says so. You should want to play when you are fresh and mentally alert, but tournaments do not offer you that kind of flexibility.

But to be successful in poker you need to master the complexities and the nuances of the form of poker that you are playing. Playing a conventional "book" game that is akin to automatic pilot will not get the job done, especially in middle-limit games these days. And you must remember that failure comes in many forms.

Say you are playing $20-$40 limit hold'em at your favorite online site. You rake in a $320 pot and give yourself a pat on the back for a hand well played. But was it well played? That $320 may seem like success, but if a better player could extract an extra $30 from the same situation, then that is hardly success.

The fact is that player leave money on the table for many reasons, the main one being lack of ability. But another reason is simply not having your head in the game. You switch off only for a second, but you don't have time to correct this short mental lapse because the pace of online play forbids it.

The action has moved on, you have missed something and it has cost you money. When we lose a big pot because of this mental lapse, we tend to remember it, but it is all those pots that we win where we should have won more that go undetected, and it is this silent enemy that turns would-be winners into lifelong losers.