You will find substantial differences between online poker gaming and conventional, in person gaming.

One obvious difference is that players don’t sit right across from each other, removing any ability to observe others’ reactions and body language. Instead, online poker players learn to focus more keenly on betting patterns, reaction time and other behavior tells that will be not physical in nature. Since poker is a game that will require adaptability, successful online players learn to master the new frontiers of their surroundings.

Another less obvious difference will be the rate of play. In brick and mortar casinos the dealer has to collect the cards, then shuffle and deal them after every hand. As a result of this as well as other delays common in offline casinos, an average rate of play is around thirty hands each hour. Online casinos, on the other hand, don’t have these delays; the dealing and shuffling are instant, you can find no delays relating to counting chips (for a split pot), as well as on average the play is faster because of “auto-action” buttons (where the player selects his action before his turn). It’s not uncommon for an online poker table to average sixty to eighty hands per hour.

One other serious change results from the very fact that online poker rooms, in some cases, offer online poker schools that teach the basic principles and significantly speed up the learning curve for novices. Many excellent online casino gambling agent poker rooms also provide free money play so that players may practice these skills in several poker games and limits without the risk of losing real money. Those who previously had no way to learn and improve since they had nobody to play with now possess the ability to learn the game a lot more quickly and gain invaluable experience from free money play.

Conversely, tracking poker play online is easy. Most online poker rooms support “Hand Histories” text files which track every action both you and your opponents made during each hand. The capability to specifically track each and every played hand has advantages. Many third-party software applications process hand history files and return detailed summaries of poker play. These not simply include exact tallies of rake and winnings, which are useful for tax purposes, but also offer detailed statistics about the person’s poker play. Serious players use these statistics to look for weaknesses or “leaks” (mistakes that leak money from their winnings) within their game. Such detailed analysis of poker play was never obtainable in the past, but with the growth of online poker play, it’s now commonplace among nearly all serious and professional online poker players.