To win at poker you need to show skill and expertise. To be a successful poker player you need to have a faultless memory and the ability to accurately read other people whilst always keeping your own feelings hidden behind your ‘poker face’. Because of all these factors you have to wonder how online poker is so successful – if the whole point of the game is for players to be able to read each other’s expressions, then wouldn’t it be incredibly difficult to win against unseen opponents? But this could work both ways, and being invisible to your opponents could make it easier to keep that poker face even when you think you’ve got no chance.
Whichever way you look at it, playing poker online is a very different game. If nothing else, poker sites like Party Poker have brought the game to a much wider audience and give them the chance to bet as much or as little as they like. Playing online it’s much easier to bluff and take risks, as other players can’t read your true intentions on your face. Of course this also works both ways because you can’t see them any more than they can see you and have no way of telling if they have been dealt a good hand. You need to rely heavily on your memory but after a few games you can become just as skilled at online poker as the real game.
The danger of course is that an inexperienced player who lost money on a poker site could be tempted to go back and keep trying to win until it was too late. But provided you limit yourself to betting only what you can afford to lose then online poker games could be a really good way to learn and have fun doing it. The only disadvantage to playing on popular sites like Party, Betfair and Littlewoods Poker is that they make their money by taking a cut of every pot, called the rake, as commission. It’s worth looking around for a good online poker deal before signing up to a poker room, sites like raketherake.com offer good rakeback deals for a number of different poker sites.