Playing Online Again

It’s been a difficult time for the casual poker player in the United States as of late. You have to live near a casino or know some people in your area with a home game to play poker if you want to play. The unfortunate thing about that is the inability to play online poker from almost every state in the union on a regulated and fully legal site. There are still some sites operating in the US, and it’s still legal in the vast majority of the states in the US to play online (Sorry, Washington). The trouble is in dealing with the banks. I’ve been hesitant to put money online because of the reluctance of banks in the US to deal with the poker sites. I’ve been keeping abreast of the situation via online poker forums and my friends’ discussions on Twitter and other social media, and I’ve decided that there are some sites that are worth playing and I’m making my first re-appearance in some major tournaments online. I thought I’d document some of my thoughts regarding the process and put them here for my readers.

It was incredibly easy to deposit on the site I chose. I’ve heard it’s easy to cash out, but I guess we’ll see. Ease of deposit and withdrawal has to be one of the best things about the regulated online market. I’ve played a few times while I was in Nevada, and being able to walk into a casino and hand them cash and withdraw via the same method with only a day or two processing period on the withdrawal was incredible. Even when PokerStars and Full Tilt were operating in the US, we still had to wait a couple of weeks to receive the money we withdrew. So far the deposit has been easy and this particular site waives processing fees on your first deposit. I’m looking forward to withdrawing a bunch of money pretty soon, and I’ll follow up with some thoughts on that process.

The software on all of these sites is not up to the standard of PokerStars or Full Tilt, but I knew that coming in. The searchability and customizability are lacking from this particular site. The tournament lobby is a little cluttered and can’t be easily filtered to your personal specifications. Some of the other refinements of the PokerStars client even four years ago are missing, and truthfully, it just doesn’t look or feel as nice. Finally, the biggest issue is almost inexcusable in this day and age. There are no synchronized breaks in tournaments. Having breaks at different times in different tournaments basically means that you have to miss hands regularly in order to go to the bathroom, eat, or do whatever else it is you do during breaks. It’s completely inexcusable to force people to choose between a bottle and missing a few hands. I guess if you don’t have to compete with PokerStars’ amazing software, you don’t have to keep innovating, or even keeping up with the software from seven years ago.

I was pleasantly surprised with the level of play in the tournaments I played. I’ve been hearing over and over how the games have gotten tougher online, and I’m sure they have, but I found them to be quite enjoyable and nowhere near as tough as I was expecting. I know that this isn’t PokerStars, where all of the toughest online players play, but it was still a relatively high buyin and a very nice prizepool for a US facing site so I’m surprised that the field wasn’t considerably tougher. I did play some interesting hands that I think will be great for analysis and perhaps an article or two over the next several weeks.

It was nice to get back to playing online and I’m eager to possibly continue to do so in the future. I think I’ll have to do a little bit of refining my setup as it has slacked quite a bit over the last few years. I’ll also need to work on some of the fundamentals that have strayed a bit with playing a more exploitive game like I have been over the last few years in tournaments. One major US-facing online site has anonymous tables, and those require a higher level of understanding of the fundamentals of tournament poker. This is even more true of their version of Rush Poker. It’s impossible to play any type of exploitive game against a truly random five opponents every hand. I’m looking forward to future chances to play online and the new challenges it will present. Perhaps I’ll find some time to move from being a casual online player to a serious one. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG