Online poker play.

You have to be in the online poker play game environment for at least a little while before your online poker play juices start to flow. When you jump from cleaning the cat box to posting the blind the shut into your effect source state can lag quite far behind. Many players thus, find themselves mentally unprepared for online online poker play play play on both a conscious and an unconscious level. They haven done the conscious preparation work which gets them mentally ready for the challenges and choices they e about to face, nor have they made the unconscious transaction from another mental state into the online poker play. Resource state. You can see where this is leading. If you make the jump into online online poker play play play without proper mental preparation, you , Run the risk of playing badly to start, and losing early Money as a Result. This would be like taking a long flight to Las Vegas and throwing yourself into a online poker play game before youd had a chance to recover from jet lag or other rigors of the trip. Maybe you go to Vegas only a couple times a year; on- line play offers you the opportunity to make this mistake of impatience every time you play. No player can afford to squander the quality of the first half hour of his session, every single session, and hope to be net plus over time. Against this is you must be prepared to, well, be prepared. Treat every session has a serious affair. Take a moment, or two or three, to collect your thoughts and plan your strategy before jumping into a online poker play game. The mistakes you don make early are ones you don have to overcome later, Heres another emotional danger of online online poker play play play: the visceral Impact of online poker play is Jess potent online online poker play play than it is in the b&m.

If you lose a big pot in a card room, you see those chips go away and you see your stack get smaller Online online poker play play the only thing that changes is a number on a screen. Its all too easy to treat that number as insignificant, all too easy not to feel the loss, deep down in your gut where it counts. When that happens-when you disconnect from the emotional impact of losing-you run the risk of not caring whether you win or lose. Now keep in mind, being emotionally involved in the online poker play game is not the same as experiencing fear. A lot of players, in any online poker play environment, have the problem of fearing to lose. You might feel that the natural emotional disconnect of online online poker play play online poker play would free you from that fear. But draw the distinction between not fearing and not caring. When you don care about the outcome, sloppy play, poor decision making, and stunning losses can result. Its easy to forget you e playing for real money online online poker play play; thus it is easy to become careless about what you do.

This underscores once again the need for a serious approach to the recreation of online online poker play play play. Its a given that you will enjoy online online poker play play online poker play more if you play well and win money. Neither of these things will happen if you don attend to the real emotional differences between online online poker play play play and the b&m experience. When you play online poker play in a card room in a casino, you e not just emotionally prepared; you e also behaviorally pre~ pared. In service of perfect online poker play, you attend to all sorts of useful little procedures. You put on your online poker play face, so that you present the image you wish to present to the other players at the table. You increase your awareness-.of other people, drawing information about your opponents through your eyes and ears, and collating this endless stream of sensory input into hypotheses about dependencies and such. You note the number of chips you have counting and recounting them, perhaps) and consider your stack size relative to others at the table. You monitor play at the other tables to see whether a richer opportunity awaits you elsewhere. You do all of these things automatically, because you e in a online poker play environment, and that very environment, through habit and long experience, instructs you to do so. you find it easy and natural to enter your zone of quality online poker play and play your best online poker play game. Not so online online poker play play. Sure you e still getting visual and auditory cues, but these cues are representational not real.

And Im not talking about the difference between real-world and online online poker play play tells is there definitely are online online poker play play tells, and Ill get to them in due time. No} what I am talking about is that when you e playing online poker play online online poker play play} your online poker play information comes from a limited source-your computer screen. You e accessing a online poker play environment} but you e not immersed in it} and the difference will impact your play. Then there}s the matter of focus. As previously men., tioned, everything in the b&m environment reminds you that you e playing online poker play. You}re in a place where online poker play is played, surrounded by other people doing the very same thing, in a room dedicated to that pursuit. But when you play online online poker play play} sitting in your swivel chair in front of your computer, you e in a place that is only used for online poker play on a part-time basis. Looking around my home office, I see a place where I write my books} balance my checkbook, talk on the phone, send and receive e-mail, read, listen to music, watch TV, play Hockey Sack, and sometimes sleep. Looking around your home office or cozy computer nook} what kind of space do you see? As an exercise, take a moment and list all the uses you put that space to.

You will be astounded to discover what a tiny fraction of your time in that space could possibly be devoted to online poker play. Whatever else it may be, then, your Internet online poker play terminal is in no sense a pure online poker play environment. It has dozens of distractions built in, and these distractions will definitely conspire to erode your focus. When you play online poker play in a place where you e used to doing other things its hard to bring your best concentration to bear. The impact of this is greatest during your first days of online online poker play play online poker play play, but it never completely goes away; You don yet nave long experience playing online poker play on- line; you also have a great deal of unlearning to do. Many of the strengths and skills that you rely upon to succeed in the Teal world simply will not serve you in cyberspace. I, for instance, have collected countless extra bets by trading on my playful image. With a natural tendency to do outrageous things anywhere anyway, I parlay this tendency into and at the online poker play table, which obscure the true quality or nature of my play. I call it pulling my foes into a false sense of stupidity, but its not a skill that. serves me well online online poker play play for the obvious reason that they can see me dressed like a leprechaun or tearing up a twenty-dollar bill and swallowing the pieces with my orange juice. Nor, for that matter, can I see their hands shake when they have big tickets. This, then, is another reason why you don naturally bring your best online poker play game to the online online poker play play experience.-You don have your usual bag of tricks at your disposal, and it takes time and training to fill a new bag. Especially when you e first starting out, you may find yourself feeling hamstrung by what you can do online online poker play play. You don have to feel hamstrung. You can feel articulately and specifically hamstrung, if you just spend a moment to explore the issue more fully.

 With that in mind, Id like you to do another exercise. (If youve read my other books, you know that Im big on exercises, especially written ones, which allow you to investigate your play in a thorough, logical, and concrete way. Catalog what you perceive as the strengths of your online poker play game and ask yourself whether you think ea(h strength will serve you online online poker play play. Did you do the exercise? If not, I urge and exhort you to go back and do it now. With this book, as with all tomes \ that try to teach you something, you only get out of the experience what you put into it. So do this exercise. In fact do them all. They cost little enough in terms of time and only slightly more in terms of frank Introspection, but in all cases pay real dividends when you play in case you hadn heard, no online poker play player can hope to excel if hes not willing to be honest and articulate with himself about himself. And while its easy to be honest about your strengths (I project a damn good table image!) you may find it harder to be honest with yourself about your failings (My voice cracks when Im bluffing). But take heart! Some of those failings may actually be failings no more once you get online online poker play play. (Who cares whether your voice cracks, e.g.) So lets do the exercise again, only this time list some holes or leaks in your play and speculate on whether those leaks are likely to hurt you online online poker play play. Some of you flaws, then, will actually hurt you less on- line, because the online online poker play play environment doesn give them a chance to do damage. For the ones that can hurt you, though, be warned that they can hurt you a good deal more, for the simple reason that youll see a lot more hands.

 Whereas a b&m table might throw down 30 hands an hour, you could see twice or even three times that many online online poker play play. If you do the same thing wrong over and over again in the real world, youll repeat that mistake a whole lot more online online poker play play. Heres another reason you e likely not to bring your best online poker play game to the virtual table: No one is watching! In the real world, we often make choices based on how we are perceived or how we want to be perceived by other players. Many, for example, don like to get caught playing bad hands out of position. We fear the disapproval of our online poker play peers. Now, one could argue whether this fear is sensible or not, but the fact remains that, in a live online poker play game against real people (especially people we know), pure human pride will often keep us from getting out of line. Not so online online poker play play. Online online poker play play, you are anonymous. Hiding behind a screen name or an avatar, you can justify all sorts of crazy plays that you wouldn let yourself get caught dead doing in a real-world online poker play game. Draw to an inside straight? Why not? It only costs a bet, and whos to know?

Run a hopeless bluff? Why not? It probably won work, but whos to know? The fact of this anonymity will blow serious holes in your play if you e not careful. Its amazing how, out there in the b&ms, peer pressure keeps us on the straight and narrow. In cyber- space, that peer pressure is gone, and its absence can have a noticeable negative effect on our play. Not to beat the dead horse of this, but I really do encourage you to participate in this book in a meaningfully interactive way. To help you do that, Ill pose this question, just as if I were your high school teacher and this were a pop quiz: Based on everything you know (or don yet know) about Internet online poker play I why do you think you may be unlikely to play this brand of online poker play at the highest level of your skill? Write down your observations here, or in a separate note.: book or journal. Youll be surprised how much better you play it0nly you become aware of the reasons that you might not automatically play so well.

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FASTER ONLINE ONLINE POKER PLAY PLAY When you go to play online poker play at a b&m, you put your name on a sign-up list, and you wait to get a seat They way have a spot open for you already, in which case you are seated immediately-immediately,. that is, except for the time it takes you to convert your cash into chips,. rustle up a chair cushion, wait for some player or players to switch seats, wait for your blind, and so on, Immediately in this can can take several minutes. When you go to play online poker play on the Internet, you put your name on a sign-up list, and you are seated immediately. In the time it takes for some not-very-complex soft- ware to load, you will find yourself choosing from among the available seats at the table. You bring your cyber chips with you when you come, so you don have to flag down any chip runners. You e sitting in your own chair at your own desk, so if you need cushions, you already have them. If other players want to change seats, they either did so before you arrived, or they e out of luck now. You may still have to wait for your blind, but even that wait will be a fraction of its real-world equivalent, as a function ,of the faster play of hands. And thats just getting into the online poker play game. Now think about all the simple process things that happen faster in the online online poker play play realm. Shuffling is done automatically, in nanoseconds. Cards are dealt in the blink of an eye. Bets are placed at mouse-click pace. Theres pot to push. If the pot is split, the calculation is done instantly. There is never a deck change or a dealer change, no wait for players to be seated. All the business of online poker play happens at breakneck speed on line. How do you think this will affect your play? youll have much less time to think about things, thats for sure. Suppose you take a bad beat. In the real world, youll probably have half a minute or a minute (the time it takes the dealer to scramble, shuffle, and deal) to collect your thoughts before you have to make another online poker play decision.

This time may be just what you need to calm down, regain your composure, get over your bad beat, and keep from going on tilt. But take that same beat online online poker play play, and you e faced with another decision again almost immediately. The emotional fallout from the last hand can carry overmuch more easily to the next hand, because the next hand is upon you so fast. You may find yourself on tilt before you know it, because you face your next decision literally e- fore you know it. There are certain circumstances where the pace of play online online poker play play can seem infuriatingly slow. Watching another players time-out clock count down can seem to take a eternity (and make you want to reach out through the phone line and strangle the chowder head whos slowing down your online poker play game). But this full is only relative to the over accelerated speed of the online online poker play play online poker play game. It merely points out by exception that online online poker play play online poker play is fast is beyond fast compared to the Real-world online poker play game. Will this have an impact? Of course it will, and not just in terms of tilt risk. It can also make breaks difficult to take. In a real-world online poker play game of holdem or Omaha, for example, if :you e moving into early position, you know that it will take at.1.east a few minutes for the blind to reach you, giving you time to go to the bathroom or catch a breath of fresh air or whatever. Online online poker play play; that blind is never more than moments away. The call to action is continuous. Its hard to tear yourself away. Arid its easy to experience mental fatigue. You see hand after hand after hand, with no despite. Things start to blur.

 The composition of tables changes so quickly, too, and this has an impact as well. If you e playing $3-$6 dealers choice at the Players Club in Ventura, California, a nice little three-table joint with a crew of reliable regulars/you e likely to see the same faces, or mostly the same faces, through- out a whole evenings play. That kind of thick consistency never happens online online poker play play. Your foes come from all over the world. They come and go in seconds. You may not even have noticed they were there. Just when youve drawn a reliable bead or read, they vanish into thin air. This acce.1.erated pace of play is not all bad, of course. lf the hands are coming at you fast and furious, it does tend to focus your attention and keep your head in the, online poker play game. Theres literally no time for the mind to wander. Also, whatever real edge you have over your opponents will be magnified by the speed of play. If you make better decisions than they do, you want to be involved in as many decision situations as possible. The online online poker play play environment is a realm of many decisions. Get your foes leaning the wrong way and you can keep the long and profitable time.