There are actually substantial differences between online poker gaming and conventional, in-person gaming.

One obvious difference is the fact that players don’t sit right across from each other, removing any capability 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 which are not physical in nature. Since poker is a game that requires 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. Due to this and other delays common in offline casinos, the regular rate of play is about thirty hands per hour. Online casinos, on the contrary, do not have these delays; the dealing and shuffling are instant, there are actually no delays relating to counting chips (for a split pot), and also 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 safe online casino gambling poker table to average sixty to eighty hands by the hour.

One other serious change results from the fact that online poker rooms, in certain cases, offer online poker schools that teach the fundamentals and significantly speed up the learning curve for novices. Many online poker rooms also provide free money play to ensure that players may practice these skills in a variety of poker games and limits without the risk of losing real money. Folks that previously had no way to learn and improve since they had no one to play with now possess the capability to learn the game far more quickly and gain invaluable experience from free money play.

On the contrary, tracking poker play online is easy. Most online poker rooms support “Hand Histories” text files which track every action both you as well as your opponents made during each hand. The ability to specifically track every single played hand has several advantages. Many third-party software applications process hand history files and return detailed summaries of poker play. These not only 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 really is now commonplace among nearly all serious and professional online poker players.