What I Miss About Online Poker

Here I am, writing this on a Sunday, and it’s a stark contrast to the Sundays of my past. Up until, oh, I don’t know, April 15 2011, I played a significant amount of online poker. I was, in fact, sponsored by the world’s largest online poker site, PokerStars, as a member of Team PokerStars Pro. The Sundays of my past were filled with online tournaments from the moment I woke up until, hopefully, just before I went to sleep. A great day was over after midnight Pacific time and a bad one was over around dinner time. Most of mine were over somewhere in between.

Here we are, several years later, and I’m reflecting on those days. Today I’m going to choose to reflect on the positive things, the things that I miss about my career as an online poker player.

The thing I miss most and I will continue to miss is the convenience of online poker. Here’s what a typical work day looks like for me now: Get up and help take care of the kids until their nap, take a shower and get ready somewhere in there, get my money ready to take to the casino, drive to the casino, get myself on the list for the games I want, wait for a seat to open up in one of the games I want, buy chips, play poker. Here’s what it used to look like for me to get into a poker game: Go upstairs to the office, turn on computer, open PokerStars lobby, pick the tournaments or cash games I want to play, play poker. It took so much less time and effort to start playing poker, it’s truly incomparable and I have it so much better than almost everybody in the poker playing world. I live within an hour’s drive of the three biggest poker rooms in the world and I choose not to go to them because I live a 40-minute ocean-side drive away from another 50 table poker room. So many people who used to play online poker for a living didn’t have it so easy to make the transition as I did because they lived in the middle of the US where there wasn’t any poker, and they didn’t want to uproot their family to continue playing poker.

I also miss the speed. Playing online with multiple tables running, it was very easy to play 800 or more hands in an hour. Playing live, I’m happy to see 30 hands in an hour. Even a slow table of online no-limit hold’em got 70 hands an hour. Things just take so much longer playing live with the shuffling, the pitching of cards, the time to scoop the bets in, someone’s eating or buying chips or running back to their seat to play their hand. It’s interminable, and when you’re playing in a super good game but they’re all playing very slowly, it’s infuriating.

I miss the rake, man do I miss the rake. PokerStars current rake (that they’ve been roundly criticized for going to), in a game that is comparable to the stakes I play live, is 4.5 percent up to $2.80 per hand. The game I play in regularly is $5+$1 jackpot, and it’s not prorated. As soon as there is a flop, they take $6 out of the pot and this is better than any other place in Southern California. The Commerce and the Bike both take $2 automatically, whether there is a flop or not, and they take an extra dollar on hands that get to the river. The worst part is that there are other, less obvious rakes that you have to pay to play live poker. You have to tip dealers when you win a pot, you have to tip chip runners if you choose to use them, you have to occasionally tip floor men and brush, and you have to pay for the gas and wear and tear on your car in order to play. It’s a really huge drain on your profit and one that is so often overlooked by people deciding whether they’re going to start playing for a living.

Finally, I miss the data. When you’re playing online poker, you’re using a database like Hold’em Manager or PokerTracker (if you’re not, you’re making a huge mistake) and, whether you choose to use a HUD or not, you have an incredible wealth of knowledge about your game and the game of your opponents. It’s an invaluable learning tool and one that is essential to becoming a better online poker player. In fact, poker databases are the main reason that poker knowledge has exploded so much since the online era. Even more important than being able to play millions of hands in a year is the ability to analyze all the information gained from playing that many hands. It’s very difficult to get a crystal clear view of how a live opponent plays in a given situation, but pretty easy to get that information on your online opponents because your memory is fragile but the database isn’t.

There are so many things that I miss about online poker and these are just a few of them. There are some things I don’t miss about online poker as well and I’ll cover those in my next article. ♠

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