You will discover 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 that can be not physical in nature. Since poker is a game that needs adaptability, successful online players learn to master the new frontiers of their surroundings.

Another less obvious difference is 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, a normal rate of play is approximately thirty hands hourly. Online casinos, on the flip side, 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 as a result of “auto-action” buttons (where the player selects his action before his turn). It is not uncommon for an online poker table to average sixty go to Campus eighty hands hourly.

Another essential change results from the very fact that online poker rooms, in some cases, offer online poker schools that teach the basics and significantly speed up the learning curve for novices. Many online poker rooms also provide free money play so that players may practice these skills in a variety of poker games and limits without the risk of losing real money. Folks who previously had no way to learn and improve since they had nobody to play with now have the ability to learn the game much more quickly and gain invaluable experience from free money play.

On the other hand, 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 just about every played hand has several benefits. Many third-party software applications process hand history files and return detailed summaries of poker play. These not just include exact tallies of rake and winnings, which are useful for tax purposes, but in addition offer detailed statistics about the person’s poker play. Serious players use these statistics to check for weaknesses or “leaks” (mistakes that leak money from their winnings) in their game. Such detailed analysis of poker play was never accessible in the past, but with the expansion of online poker play, it’s now commonplace among virtually all serious and professional online poker players.