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I used to play online poker a lot in the early 2000s. What's really interesting between Stu's era and today (or even the last 20 years) is technology. Live po
by nickjj 7y ago
I used to play online poker a lot in the early 2000s.
What's really interesting between Stu's era and today (or even the last 20 years) is technology.
Live poker is a pretty slow game. You might get 30 hands in per hour and play with 5-15 other people (rotating in / out) during a few hour time span. The bottleneck is mainly the physical action of moving cards around, counting chips and slow players due to the environment.
But online is a totally different game. You could pretty easily play 4 tables in parallel by tiling them on your monitor. Then there was software you could run that overlays stats about every player you encounter (collected automatically). You gathered tremendous amounts of data that you could then analyze in real time to help make decisions and then also look at a hand by hand audit with those stats to help evaluate your game after the fact.
Some people ended up playing 10+ tables at once (even at pretty high stakes), and an online game can easily get 90 hands per hour just on a single table. So if you do the math, you could be cranking through 900 hands an hour vs 30 in a live scenario. That's 30x more hands played per hour. If you factor in playing for tens of thousands of hours, the amount of experience you can gain online in such a short amount of time is crazy. You could put in many millions of hands online vs low hundreds of thousands live, and then have a ton of data to help figure out the game better.
1 year of playing online like that gives you 30 years worth of experience. Of course it's not as high quality of experience since 10 tabling is tough, but even if you dropped it to 5 tables, that's still condensing 15 years worth of live play in 1 real life year online. So it's no surprise that players now have a huge upper hand in being able to improve their game.
- ryandrake 7y agoOnline and live are very different, though. Some of the skills are transferrable, others not so much. I think you can get very good online and then get trounced live where you are limited to one table and don't have all your HUDs and record keeping software. When you're playing 10+ tables simultaneously online, are you even paying attention to the action at any particular table when you're not in the hand?
- nickjj 7y agoI don't play that many tables, but probably not much thought would be given to those hands since people playing 10-20+ tables are usually trying to grind out hands at a low +BB/100 win rate or even breaking even while taking advantage of rake back deals (not sure if that still applies today). But at 3-5 tables you can definitely play close attention to everything going on. A lot of really high level players do well in both environments.
- tantalor 7y ago> software you could run that overlays stats about every player you encounter Is this allowed?
- nickjj 7y agoIt was back when I played and probably is today. It was also openly used and talked about in large scale SAAS sites that offered training videos. Back then most people used Poker Tracker or Holdem Manager. Things might have changed since then. I haven't played since "Black Friday" which is when the US cracked down on letting people play poker online.
- AllanHoustonSt 7y agoPT4 and HM2 are still the dominant software products but more sites have popped up that either block all HUDs who limit your options to one or two random crappy offshoot HUDs that happen to work with that site for whatever reason. You can still usually export your hands to PT4 and/or HM2 after the fact.